new releases DEEP-SEA DIVER THE WALLS OF poetry by JERICHO Shane McCauley short fiction by Julie Lewis

This new collection celchrates human endeavour, An accomplished and individual collection which is recalls ancient philosophies, takes a wry look at full of surprises. Julie Lewis explores the charged current prohlcms, considers art and reality, and horderland offact and fantasy, 'reality' and the attempts some sort of definition of self and society. transforming power of fiction. Shane McC 'al/ler presellIs a/dicit\' of ph rase .' . an As a short story writa, she is in the top rank. - Oliver imaginatil'e I "!'rl 'e - A I/stralian Boo/..: Rel'iew Deacon, TheSl/nday Tillles rrp: $12.00 rrp: $12.00

THE CHASE SUMMER WILL an autobiography COME AGAIN Ida Mann The Story of Australian POWs' Fight for Survival in Japan John Lane

An exuherant self-portrait of a remarkahlc woman, The story of life as a prisoner in Japan. informed hy who pursued a professional career through a most acute ohservation, and an extraordinary sense of difficult period for women of independent spirit. Ida history which enahled the author to somehow ohtain Mann was a character of enormous energy, intellect a camera and produce a unique visual record ofthose and charm. turhulent weeks following the Japanese surrender. Mann :~feding.l(" description emerges in a refreshingly There have heen many stories from Changi and the I/npretentiol/s way - Stephanie Dowrick, '{he National Burma railway, hut this is one of the first accounts Tilll('.\' on SI/nday of the fight for survival on Japanese soil. rrp: $15.95 (ph) $29.95 (hh) rrp: $16.50 Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1 Finnerty Street (PO Box 891) Fremantle Telephone (09) 3358244 WESTERLY Vol. 32, No. I, March 1987

CONTENTS

STORIES

Us and Them 62 Adriana Ellis Scape Goat 13 Penny Lee American Doubles 5 Julie Lewis The Evening Star 43 Peter Loftus The Sea-Serpent of Sandy Cape 45 Rosaleen Love A Birthday Present for Briony 57 Dave Metzenthen The Boy From the Dark Street 79 Sandra Moore Julian Dances, Mama II Doreen Sullivan POEMS Diane Beckingham 15 Fiona Place 19 Lauris Edmond 54 Andrew Sant 10 Philip Hodgins 66 L.K. Wakeling 84 Anthony Lawrence 17 M.E. Patti Walker 52 Shane McCauley 56 ARTICLES Coming Late Into the 21 Graeme Kinross Light: George Johnston Smith Working with Arthur Boyd 69 Peter Porter REVIEWS Hendrik Kolenberg, Lloyd Rees 91 Barbara Chapman Caroline Caddy, Letters From the North 88 James Legasse John Scott, Landscapes of 89 Colette Warbrick Western Australia

Notes on Contributors 95

Cover: "Narcissus" by Arthur Boyd. Reproduced by courtesy of Arthur Boyd, Peter Porter and Tom Rosenthal. OBITUARY

Jim Legasse, who came to Perth from the United States of America in 1974, died on 24 December 1986, after a long illness. Jim established a reputation as a fine teacher of American and English literature in the Deparment of English at the University of Western Australia. He considered creative writing to be an integral part of the study of literature, and recognised his own writing as a site for the examination of aesthetic questions, values and ideologies. In Thin Borders (1985), a collection of his own poems, and The Same Old Story (1982), a collection of short stories, he tested the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. Numerous of his articles, reviews, poems and stories have appeared in Westerly, Patterns, Decade, Power and Desire and other journals. He is sadly missed by his students, his colleagues, his fellow writers and his readers. WESTERLY a quarterly review ISSN 0043-342x

EDITORS: Bruce Bennett. Peter Cowan. Dennis Haskell

EDITORIAL ADVISORS: Margot Luke. Hilary Fraser

SECRET ARIAL: Caroline Horohin TYPING: Janet King

Wester(v is published quarterly at the Centre for Studies in Australian Literature in the English Department. University of Western Australia with assistance from The Literature Board of the Australia Council. the Federal Government's arts funding and advisory body, and the Western Australian Arts Council. The opinions expressed in Westerly are those of individual contributors and not of the Editors or Editorial Advisors. Correspondence should be addressed to the Editors, Westerly. Department of English, University of Western Australia, Nedlands, Western Australia 6009 (telephone 380 3838). Unsolicited manuscripts not accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope will not be returned. All manuscripts must show the name and address of the sender and should be typed (double-spaced) on one side of the paper only. Whilst every care is taken of manuscripts, the editors can take no final responsibility for their return; contributors are consequently urged to retain copies of all work submitted. Minimum rates for contributors - poems $20.00; prose pieces $50.00; reviews, articles, $40.00. It is stressed that these are minimum rates, based on the fact that very brief contributions in any field are acceptable. In practice the editors aim to pay more, and will discuss payment where required. Recommended sale price: $5.00 per copy (W.A.) Subscriptions: $16.00 per annum (posted); $30.00 for 2 years (posted). Special student subscription rate: $14.00 per annum (posted). Single copies mailed: $5.00. Subscriptions should be made payable to Westerly and sent to The Secretary, CSAL, Department of English, University of Western Australia, NedIands, Western Australia 6009. In other States Westerly may be obtained from: New South Wales, Victoria, ACT and Tasmania: Hale & Iremonger Pty. Ltd., Tel: (02) 5604977 and (03) 537 1624. Queensland: Tema Agencies, Tel: (07) 3786190. Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Tel: (09) 335 8244. Synopses of literary articles published in Westerly appear regularly in Abstracts of English Studies (published by the American National Council of Teachers of English). Two Wester(v Indexes, 1956-77 and 1978-83, are available at $8.00 from the above address.

JULIE LEWIS

American Doubles

When there's a third player the rules of the game change. Zac said he'd meet me on the steps of the G PO at the corner of George Street. If it's raining he'll be at the top of the steps. In the shelter of the colonnade. At twelve-fifteen. . At eight o'clock, while Phil is still eating breakfast - the stuff they call 'Continental' in these places; stewed prunes, fruit juice and little packets of cornflakes like they used to hand out in show bags when we were kids - he asks what I have planned for the day. I did tell you. I'm meeting Zac for lunch. Phil has never met Zac, but he does know about him. Zac acts as my agent. Well, a kind of agent. He tries to place my work. It's convenient when you live on the other side of the continent to have someone on the spot. Where it all happens. Phil is having a great deal of trouble opening the foil pack that hides a smear of butter. They've taken the fun out of food, he says. Zac and I meet only once or twice a year. Sometimes not that often. Depends in which city my committee is schedulc~d to meet. Phil can't understand how I let myself get involved in committees. I tell him it's one way to meet people. What kind of a reason is that? he asks. I can't remember when Phil last had a holiday. He's an actor. He's in great demand back home - a bit type cast. Women adore him; they want to mother him, but they terrify him and mostly he leaves them alone. When I knew this trip was coming up I tried to persuade him to come with me. To look further afield, I said. Why? he asked. You never know what it might lead to. And so he's here. It's made it difficult for me and Zac to get together. You know when you are speaking on the telephone that an eavesdropper only hears half the conversation, but you imagine he overhears both voices. Zac said he knew someone was there when I rang. You sound guarded, he said. I had thought you might like a harbour cruise, says Phil. We are flying out later this afternoon. Boats make Phil impatient.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 5 I want to say ... I should say, thanks for thinking of it. It would be nice, but there won't be time. Instead I say, so long as we're back in good time. I know the ferry will break down. I try to open the miniature bucket of longlife milk for Phil's coffee. The top will not lift. I stab it with the end of a spoon. Milk spurts over my blouse. Now I will have to change. Phil dawdles on the pier looking at things. What's so special about the trinket shops? the squalid take-aways? We miss the 9.30 ferry. The 10.30 doesn't get back until noon. It will be a close call. Zac's a punctural person. I plunge into the wardrobe looking for a clean blouse. We get back in good time. Phil walks me to the GPO. He's reluctant to leave me there in case Zac doesn't turn up. Phil is very protective. Of course Zac does turn up and there are the three of us. The introductions are clumsy. This is my brother. I try not to apologise. This is Zac - you know (my voice lifts on the last word. Gauche). He handles my work. They lob pleasantries. They are surprisingly at ease. Zac asks Phil to join us for lunch. Phil says he has things to do, but thanks anyway. I hold a smile. Well have to check out this morning, says Phil. I know. My voice is muffled by the clothes in the wardrobe. You're quiet, says Phil. Anything wrong? No. Nothing. When you live with someone for a long time you learn to make private space. You don't talk to each other very much. There is a different kind of communication. A knowing. Layered like mud. Each layer bears the relics of its times: evidence of battles fought, domestic bric-a-brac, and more subtly, memorabilia from moments of tenderness and passion. You interpret these things and think you know intuitively what the present layer will hold. Sometimes you are mistaken. These surprises keep you together. We sit around the table. Phil orders a bottle of wine. He is preparing to play host. That puts Zac under an obligation. There is a lot of talk and much laughter. Nothing is said. Zac and I have always found things to say to each other. Mostly on paper. Paper gives you space because there's no flesh involved. Or if there is, the blood has dried long before the words are read. Perhaps I should give the harbour cruise a miss. Please yourself, says Phil. Do you mind? I thought it was something you might like to do. Phil has the power to make me feel ashamed. I never know what undercurrents may disturb his surface calm. It's something I constantly anticipate. Prepare a fall-back strategy. I learnt it from my mother. She didn't call it that. She just kept two of everything - essential things in case one failed. Two torches. Two kettles. Duplicate keys for all locks. Two husbands. Phil is actually my half brother. It's nothing new being tied by blood as well as something far more powerful.

6 WESTERLY, No.1, MARCH, 1987 We follow a long line. It's hard to shake free. There's more at stake. Augusta tried to prise herself from Byron and though they became separated by the ocean he still clung to her - my dearest and only love. Quenched love is as painful as love that's never been requited. Zac is not alone. He is standing on the top step talking to a woman. It is a shock to see the kind of woman he is talking to. She cannot be a woman. No woman would wear such clothes or plaster so much make-up on her face - purple eyelids, rouged cheeks, nails painted gold. The nails are long. Like claws. She is very big. Not just tall. Really big. She is talking very fast. Her whole body is alive. Her head moves and her hands flash and glitter as the sun catches her nails. She touches Zac. His face. His shoulder. She grasps his forearm. Bends her face towards his. Kisses him. Strides away. Zac acts for many people. There is no special significance about this particular person. What is it that makes you think you have a monopoly on someone - are important to them, because they are important to you? Hello Zac. He whips round. Opens his arms. When I get my breath we start to walk. At the lights I hesitate. He grasps my hand more tightly. It's all right. Cars turn 'any time with caution': pedestrians are more adventurous in this city. Take risks. Zac laughs at my nervousness and we stumble against one another. Let's have a drink, he says. The bar is crowded. There are no tables free. All the bar stools are occupied. We find a niche by the wall. The counter lifts up at this point to let the staff in and out. There are lots of comings and goings. Don't worry, says Zac. I'll get you another drink. The laundry bag will be full of blouses. He asks how the threatened novel's coming along. It's not. I think I'll stick to fact. Things I know. It's enough one of us dabbling in fictions. One of you? Yes. Phil. My brother ... sort of. He acts. Fiction's only fact in disguise, he says. More people crowd into the bar. I can't hear you. He bends closer. Let's get out of here. After lunch we walk again. Zac knows a great deal about the trees in the Gardens. He points out a Moreton Bay fig and explains its kinship to the banyan. Fiscus indica, he says. He starts to explain the significance of the fig. Phil and I are under the fig tree. It is heavy with ripe fruit. The ground is in total shade. It is soft under-foot. Bees drone somewhere above. The air is filled with their noise. Phil swings a leg over one of the lower branches and begins to lever himself up. I pick a ripe fig and pelt him. It squishes against his nose. He leaps off the branch and grabs my arm in one movement. He holds me while he reaches for a fig. I wriggle and squirm but I can't drag free. He crams the fig against my clenched mouth. I pull away, rip a fig from a branch, tearing the flesh. My fingers sink into pulp. Figs fly. Fragments of fruit cling to our hair. Our skin is black with sap, sticky with juice. We stumble. Fall. Roll over grappling and panting and squelching in fallen figs. Maggots seethe. You can't tell me anything about figs.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 7 At reception they allocate a room. Phil has seen us in the Gardens. Has followed at a discreet distance. I turn my head but have lost him in the crowd. There is something humbling about rooms that have been used by many people before. When you think of the cavalcade of bodies who have 1:::'; on the bed; who have flung aside the bedclothes; whose fists have kneaded the pillows and whose history is recorded in little stains on the mattress, your own contribution seems paltry. There are two tiny curled threads of hair in the bath. I stare at them for a long time. Someone has sat there, the water lapping her chin. It is a woman, I am sure of that. She slips down under the sudsy water. Lies with closed eyes. I hear Zac - or is it Phil - in the bedroom. He is pouring a drink. She sits up and water slops over the edge of the bath. She pulls the plug, then stands dripping for a moment. When Zac - it is Zac - brings the drink, I wrap her quickly in a towel. Threads of body hair are quite poignant. We cross Macquarie Street. Zac says, you must get on with your novel. The market's right for novels at the moment. How long will it hold? Long enough. He walks me back to our hotel. Phil is in the foyer with our bags. The introductions are clumsy. This is my brother - I try not to apologise. This is Zac - you know (my voice rises as I say it. Gauche). He handles my work. They lob pleasantries. Must go, says Zac. Another appointment. Another? Thanks for lunch. I smile but do not lift my face. He squeezes my arm. Positions shift. Zac moves off centre. Phil snaps into sharp focus. Phil says, was it worth waiting for? What? Your lunch. Oh ... things never turn out quite the way you imagine. My father is coming to take me to the zoo. Today he has his visiting rights. He's promised the zoo for ages. My mother and Phil's father are taking Phil to the pictures. My mother's two husbands rarely meet. It's better that way, says my mother. She has put out a spare pair of sox in case I get my feet wet. And a spare handkerchief. Phil's father doesn't really want to go to the pictures. It's not every week the Harlem Globetrotters are on the TV. You be good, says my mother. Phil pulls a face. Well, come on, says Phil's father, if we're going. It's very quiet in the house. I'm glad they've gone. I sit by the window waiting for my father. When you're alone in the house you notice all kinds of noises. The roof cracks. Branches tap at the window and floorboards creak. After a while you get used to them and there's a different kind of silence. A fly buzzes. Outside, crickets make shirring noises. The sound fills your head. A car roars past. 8 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 Stops. Reverses. No-one comes to the door. The second hand jerks silently round. And round. I stare out of a watery window. My mother and Phil and Phil's father come home. There is a lot of shouting and thumping. I hear a door slam. Phil's door. The grown-ups don't know that I am still here. Their voices fade as they stamp through the house and out the back. I creep into Phil's room. There is a glob of creamy snot hanging from his nose. He sniffs it back, dashes his forearm across his face. When he sees me he must think it is all right to cry. We console each other. I check my handbag for the airline tickets. Phil picks up the bags. How was your afternoon? I ask. All right, he says. He looks at his watch. You cut it pretty fine. We click on seat belts. I hate this part, I say. Going home? No. Right now. These few moments. The land races behind. Still level. We're trapped by this thing. Why would you want to get off? It's knowing you can't. Engines roar. Whine. All that energy. We lift off. Wheels thud into place. We're flying.

WESTERLY, No.1, MARCH, 1987 9 ANDREW SANT

Fig

The magnified cross-section of a fig-leaf like a spliced honeycomb - but did the rainglobe, after it rolled slowly along a leaf, reflect the whole park when it plummetted and struck my cheek pleasantly; in a violent millisecond the posing lovers, the red-setter blow-waving its hair, the sudden diamond-blaze of light, did they explode? If I'd climbed high into the fig-tree and seen distant Adelaide I'd have witnessed the first-settlers' dream, in sepia light photographed it; but the tree, deep in its clays, was the real recorder: the massive trunk a spool of past weathers, an archive heavily buttressed, its aerial canopy of glossy leaves a receptacle for sunlight, a broad space-tracker; and the speckled crimson figs were long-range forecasters of forests plundered by squealing lorrikeets, jamming the airwaves with their news.

10 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 DOREEN SULLIVAN

Julian Dances, Mama

Pretty boy, your head is like a saucepan. Are you going to dance with me, pretty boy, pretty boy? Look Mama, 1 am dancing with Julian. 1 can hear you scream, "Where's the grace in that?" like you always scream. Look Mama, at the way he tilts his head toward me, at his orb-eyes. Stare off, pretty boy. Julian has the dancer's body and he's using it to dance tonight Mama. He is dancing with me. That night Julian came home soaked through with alcohol sweat, I'll always rememeber that. Father saying; "Wait a minute Julian, where do you think you're going?"; Julian saying, "Just lay off me. "; You saying, "Call that dancing? Where's the grace?"; Julian saying, "Layoff, okay?" Me watching, my feet sore. Mama, we're not dancing the way you and Father dance. I'm not waltzing across the kitchen floor with a stomach. How's it feel to dance Mama, with his hot belly pressed against yours, to dance with a stretched shirt so white that it shows his dark hairs beneath? His stomach swings like an interrogator's lamp. "Where's your stomach, Jules?" asked Father. "Why don't you have a stomach? You, a dancer?" "Look," he said. "Your Mama's got a stomach," he said, punched her stomach, a stomach as tense as a table top. "I don't care about stomachs," said Julian. Mama, your stomach wasn't like that when you had me. Big, hot belly lowering itself on father. How could you balance like that? 1 bet you couldn't bear to look like a distorted turtle. But you have your stomach back now. You taught Julian to dance Mama. But he does not dance like you and father. He has the dancer's body. We are dancing across the kitchen floor and Julian's leg thrusts between mine, the way you taught us. We balance well. Are you going to say: "And where's the grace in that?" for we are not graceful Mama. My stomach churns like yoghurt, and Julian is looking at his feet. 1 was watching the studio windows a few weeks ago, from the backyard. My class was over, you were teaching Julian, 1 was hanging clothes on the line. Julian was at the barre, you were facing him. Together you were doing plies. Down you went into knee bends, up 1 went to hang a shirt on the line, down you went into knee bends, up 1 went to hang trousers. Julian was crying. You asked, "What's the matter with you?" 1 put a peg in my mouth, 1 put a red-

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 II backed spider in my mouth. I could feel it moving, I would not bring my teeth together. If it crawled down my throat, how could I scream? Julian was crying. He fell down. You demanded, "Is that any way to treat a body? Where's the grace?" Father appeared, said, "Leave him be." You said, "He had female marks on his shirt." but Father just shrugged his shoulders. Julian, pretty boy, you are stepping on my feet. Is that any way to treat a body? What a tight grip you keep on my wrist, pretty boy. What big eyes you have, all the better for seeing with. Just like Mama saw your shirt. "Julian, Julian," Mama said, "look at your shirt. What is this? This female blot on your shirt?" And you said, "What are you doing, going through my clothes?" Mama, you always worry what people look like. Julian and I dance like dying calves, but at the hotel it doesn't matter so much. They let you sweat there. When I dance there I am distorted, sweat pours down my face, taking the foundation with it. I do not sweat at the barre. Does Julian? Pretty boy, there is an ivory mark on your shirt where I have rested my cheek. Look Julian, Father has Mama's hand. Will they dance? Will you dance? That's what Mama said to you when you were little: "Will you dance, my Julian boy? You have the body and the feet. I will teach you to dance." Later Mama said to me, "Would you like to dance Fairy Floss? I can teach you to dance if you're good. Mama will teach you to dance." That was when Father wore leotards. He looked like an ice-cream cone. "Takes after me," said Father stroking your pretty head Julian. But didn't your feet hurt, pretty boy? Didn't your feet hurt pretty boy, pretty boy? My feet hurt. Julian, you are stepping on my feet as we dance around this kitchen. Mama, I tell you, my feet hurt. Does your stomach pain you as Father's football of a stomach hits you, a punch-gut, punch-wrench feeling? I can see his stomach as bottomless as a squid's mouth. I don't know whether I can dance much longer Mama. Julian and I are wearing out the lino. You are stepping on my feet Julian. Let me tell you Mama, my feet hurt. You taught me to dance. My feet hurt. Tonight Mama, I am dancing with Julian. You taught us to dance.

12 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 PENNY LEE

Scape Goat

No, it was all too much. Let me tell you what happened. That bloody goat had me totally petrified. Pulling out his stake like that. Well yes I do. Keep him on a short rope. Overwise he gets to the shrubs and things. He's supposed to eat the grass isn't he? Its only because I hate mowing I got him.

Well goats can't eat grass they've walked on.

So alright. He wasn't happy. Tough bloody luck. No need to wake me out of bad dreams and headaches and chase me all around the yard half asleep. All I was doing was trying to tie him up again. He was eating the garden. Munching up the peach tree. Stomping through the fox gloves. Getting stuck right into it.

Goats like to browse. They're not really grazing animals are they?

I know. I know. Well I saved him from being killed. What use is a buck goat in a bunch of milkers? He was just trouble for everyone. He would have been dead already if it wasn't for me offering to take him.

Well you seem pretty upset. Was it worth it if he didn't do the job properly anyway. Maybe he hated you?

Yes. And I bloody hated and loved him too the bastard. Another creature around the place. Why wasn't he bloody grateful?

Would you be? On such short tether?

Oh goodness knows. But isn't it better than being dead? Poor bastard was too old even to be eaten. Maybe he was only being playful butting at me like that. Perhaps it was the wrong thing taking him but I thought it would work out O. K. Seemed like a good idea all round at the time.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 13 Yeah. A nice old thing. He really was quite playful at times.

If you had plenty of space to keep out of his way. It's true. Everyone liked him.

Did you kill him yourself then?

No. Asked friends to do it.

Did they mind?

I don't know. Being men. I guess its a male sort of thing to do. Just shoot. Carefully of course. He would never really know they said. And it was good enough for dog meat. High time something was done. Only sensible really.

Did they? Cut him up for dog meat?

No. Chucked him in the bush. Left the collar and chain on my front steps. All done while I was at work. No sign or anything. No stupid jokes. Upset I suppose, but they didn't say anything about it. He'd been a sort of a pet for all of us in a way.

And how about you?

Strange. Well it was a funny sort of decision to make. So suddenly. Relieved of course. Empty sort of. A bit embarassed. After being such a fool to take him. So noble saving him and all that. It was nice that they didn't laugh. I learnt something in a way. You can't short tether a goat to eat grass?

Yes, that. And other things. That day I was making my mind up to get it done, it was a head achey, oppressive sort of day, really hot. That's the day George's tractor ran away with him. It was out of control on a steep slope. Something got jammed.

So what happened?

He threw himself clear and went home after they pulled the tractor out. All shaky white and changed.

It would have been the second tractor death in our district in a few months. He was lucky then.

Well he was expecting something like that.

It wasn't really good country to be working a tractor in.

14 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 DIANE BECKINGHAM

Photographic Exhibition

This man walking too close three paces, three frames behind, unnerves me. Don't like people reading over my shoulder nor intuiting from my pauses what my predilections are: caryatids, nuns, the aged, the innocent, Gestapo informer, Basque villager, Berliner at the Wall; - his clearing of the throat seems an unnecessary intimacy.

Hope that study of Mexican prostitutes will engage him long enough for me to stride ahead. Of course I could go anti-clockwise round this free-standing partition and meet him face to face in an eternal cliche. Henri Cartier-Bresson himself might have captured such a moment. Photography, he said, is a way of life, it's putting one's head, eyes, heart, on the same axis.

Shall I then step left for an extreme close-up or right for a soft-focus long-distance parting shot? A room attendant tissue-wipes his lens with voyeur's eager spittle and I feel camera-shy.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 15 DIANE BECKINGHAM

Dali-Mania

Take Dali's razor to threaten his eyeball

Show him ants from the hole in your hand

Spread a bleeding carcass on his grand piano

Install a lobster telephone or burn up his pet giraffe.

Offer him titbits from the drawers of your breasts

Or a virginal rose with the hallmark of death

Be an icy enigma of erotic gooseflesh

A demonic nude with a double moustache

For revenge is a melting tiger ticking the time away.

16 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 ANTHONY LAWRENCE

Jack and the Beanstalk

Early morning windows let the world in. The bristling, uncombed roof-thatch catches the sun; the weathervane's arrows give direction to the wind; & a chimney's pale breath spiralls cloudward like a wish. This is not the house that Jack built.

In the back yard, an old woman snips the tendrils from her pumpkins. Her garden's a pop-out book for children: the dusty chooks scratch & cockle doodle in the dirt; the staked tomatoes nod & roll in their polished skins; the Red-Hot pokers lean from their mad-haired beds; & the climbing beans trace the trellice like sway-backed wire walkers.

Fairytale houses have an open-fire ambience. Their rooms are warm, & the walls are hung with winter landscapes, fox hunts, & the lamplit, mossy corridors of elf homes in the wildwood. Tonight, fantasy's kids are tucked up safe in bed - whispering & dreaming, while the night air does its blue dissolve, & branchshadow fingers the nursery window.

But all's not well in the Land of Makebelieve. Today, after the bell-necked family cow had been saved from the fiction of the market-place - her blood salvaged from the yards by some bearded, bean-canvassing cronie; Jack, clever boy, cartwheeled into the town, his fist full of magic.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 17 Tonight, in the garden, the scattered beans throw up their fine hands whitely, reaching through black earth, lifting a peach tree's clod-bound roots from the split, terrified soil. The house sighs, moves, then returns to the night. A beanstalk winds like a corkscrew into marble cloud. Over the suburbs & over the world, a broadleaf vine, twisting & climbing, a home-grown tornado, a passage to God.

As with all good spells & journeys, someone is left sleeping. Mooning in the spellbound dark, they fabricate utopia from rose-coloured potions, poison hair combs, & do not wake to see who takes their leave: they sleep the sleep of death behind a wall of applethorn.

Jack's mother breathes deeply. Her home has become a sanctuary. Curious birds gather & divide at every window. Day & night melt into each other, & the clock marks time on the mantlepiece while the spiders do their work. Soon, she will be robed in web - a winding-sheet of sticky silk.

And as she sleeps, the tale unfolds. Her son climbs into the stars; becomes one with the hand-me-down-moon.

The rest is history: the fabulous goose, the tell-tale harp. We are what we believe - giant-killers, thieves & fools, & those of us who keep our children well; who understand the magic of the young; we'll do the dance of Fairyland to the end.

18 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 FIONA PLACE

Phone S-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g

I've been phone s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g rejection.

S-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g reality. Sewing him into a patchwork quilt. Against his will.

Fiddling the dial. Twisting the cord. Month after month.

S-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g the fabric fable of time.

Maiden darning.

I should untie him. Set him free.

Only I never imagined The knots would be hidden so deep inside me.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 19 Photograph courtesy of Martin Johnston. 20 WESTERLY, No.1, MARCH. 1987 GRAEME KINROSS SMITH

Coming Late Into the Light - Our Brother George and the Johnston Story as Recent Australian History

A photograph shows George Johnston, hands on hips, fingers slid into his .belt and supporting the small of his back. His stance accentuates the thinness, the concavity of his chest under the shirt. His mouth has the tinge of a smile at its corners. His eyes, while picking up the mouth's suggestion of humour, are tough; they have seen and known a lot. They look away, waiting for the fool photographer to finish. Behind him are deep plunges of what look like dark festooned hair - the drying nets of the fishermen of Hydra. It is a picture of a writer standing at that slightly jittery fulcrum of his career. There are many other photographs of Johnston - as journalist, interviewing men in pubs, Vietnam veterans, storemen; as father and husband doling out presents to his children in a N otting Hill Gate apartment at Christmas 1952, or looking over their shoulder at the plain meal table in their Greek house while the children play with dolls. Always there is the hand poised with cigarette on the ashtray, cigarette pack and matches somewhere close. But of them all, two pictures stand out. One shows a young war correspondent, uniformed as a Captain in the Australian Army in Melbourne 1943, head tilted slightly up with confidence, eyes bright with ability and the need for success, face pointed toward the future, towards distant places and momentous events. The other is a flashlit study of a man caught in his pyjamas at a hospital window in 1966, the Sydney suburbs reflecting the sun outside, while beside the writer's elbows that rest languidly on the table, are a typewriter and a wad of its produce - the pages of a novel's final draft eking forward. The face and neck are lined, the dark hair lank, eyes dark, harrassed and weary; not much animation left. It is a portrait of a man belted by illness and by life, a man who can see his end and who is working towards it, but who is not defeated. In the years between these two photographs lies the main striving, the mystery, the scarifying self-assessment, and final long-sought artistic success of George Johnston, novelist. When George Johnston published his novel My Brother Jack and returned from the Greek island of Hydra ahead of his family to be at its launching in Australia early in 1964, he was fifty-two years old. He had been away from his country of birth for fourteen years. He had written some twenty-four earlier books. They included war-time histories and descriptions, pulp romances,

WESTERLY. No. I, MARCH, 1987 21 Photographs courtesy Martin Johnston.

22 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 stories of India, Burma, Tibet and China, and accounts of life in the Greek Islands. Even the best of them in commercial terms had done little better than moderately well. Most of them were only scantily known amongst Australians, although the name of George Johnston, the penetrating journalist, was revered. None had received any detailed critical attention. And yet, from the time of its publication, Johnston's novel My Brother Jack, has gone to the hearts of Australians, seeming to have startled them out of an underproductive reverie in which they had been trying for years to catch themselves imaged in their country's art. The book has been reprinted again and again, and now in the mid 1980's, fifteen years beyond Johnston's death, author and book are studied by many school and university students. The story has had its visual tellings in a television series, and in a national survey of Australian writing in 1984, My Brother Jack was the most frequently and warmly mentioned novel among all respondents. It tells the story of the childhood, youth, stormy adulthood and growth into early middle age of David Meredith and his brother Jack, Melbourne-born Australians. It fascinates, not only for its knowledge and detailed portrait of their home life Melbourne, but also for its fidelity to what many Australians had experienced in their own lives during that particularly formative three decades in Australian recent history, from the sad close of the Great War, through the 1920's, into the divisive toils of the Great Depression and out of that into the distant and sinister imbroglios in Europe which beckoned on a second World War - the war in Europe and the Pacific war. No novel had done that for Australia before. But its further and stronger fascination lay in its portrait of Jack, the brother of the journalist narrator, Davy, and the search for identity and ultimately self-acceptance of Davy himself, whose own life brought to the fore many of the elements of Australia's national search for identity through its sons and daughters in two centuries - expatriation, rebellion against the aridity of Australian suburbia, the mix of tension and love between two members of an Australian family in that inter-war period and the very different paths in life taken by them, which, in turn gave both a quite distinct view of his own country and his place in it. Few who read My Brother Jack in 1964 realised that its author had a real life brother called Jack, or that several other characters in the book were fairly closely drawn from life, or just how much George Johnston had drawn on his own life experience in creating his narrator, David Meredith. Fewer still, apart from very close friends, realised that when George Johnston began the novel he was spurred by a special sense of commitment and urgency - that he had been given an indeterminate but nevertheless inevitable death sentence by his doctors and knew that his life expectancy was limited. Nor could anyone know that Johnston would see to it before he died that two further books should follow My Brother Jack to complete his tale. So to probe George Johnston's life is to feel it like a constant ghost walking a few paces distant from the events portrayed in the novel. As often happens, fact and fiction begin to intertwine, become confused, even among those who know themselves to be the basis for characters in My Brother Jack. This confusion, together with a lack of understanding of the freedom the writer of fiction must allow himself in moving in and out of actuality for dramatic

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 23 purposes, was to lead later to some family bitterness about the portrayal of events in the novel. It is ironic that at one end of the scale, as with Alan Marshall's I Can Jump Puddles, many readers jump to the conclusion that My Brother Back i" }Jure autobiography and fail to hear the word 'novel' in relation to it. At the other end of the scale the more precious critics, for the purposes of their game, studiously pretend not to know that George Johnston, in telling the. story of David Meredith in the novel, is in essence and spirit writing about himself, and thus they deny him some of his achievement in artistic honesty, suffering and painfully emotional self-probings - the elements that make for the book's fascination and depth. George Johnston was born at Malvern, a south easterly suburb of Melbourne, in 1912. His father was a tram driver who later became foreman engineer at the Glenhuntly tram depot not far from his home. His mother was a nurse at Caulfield Military Hospital, who, during the boyhood of George and his brother Jack, four years his senior, tended the severely wounded men sent back from the fighting in France and Belgium. For the first two years of the war she lived in at the hospital while George and Jack were looked after by their grandmother and elder sister Jean. When their father returned from the war the family moved into the house called 'Avalon' at II Buxton Street, Elsternwick - the basis for 'Avalon', the home of Davy's boyhood in Johnston's novel forty-five years later. There the Johnston parents had a second daughter, Marjorie. As in the novel, the house was often alive with wounded ex-soldiers down from the country for medical attention and invited round to 'Avalon' for reunions and sing-songs round the pianola. One of the men, with an artificial leg, was to marry George Johnston's older sister, Jean. Although to twelve year old Jack Johnston these severely maimed men were heroes, their disfigured presence cast down the younger George. Perhaps he felt even then a dismay in the face of other people's suffering and illness that was to come to the fore again during his experiences in New Guinea and China, even though in his own struggle against TB later in life was to show a deep and private courage. Johnston, as a boy, was slightly built and small for his age. Playing out in the paddocks and yards in Elsternwick, or in the competitive bustle of the schoolground at Caulfield State School, he was assured of the protection of his older brother, Jack. With a father at first absent fighting overseas and his mother preoccupied with nursing, Johnston grew up rather lonely, shy and introverted. He had his fears - of the maimed soldiers, of the dark down the side of the house near the rustling dollicus. He was highly strung, a nail biter who gnawed until he reached the quick and his fingers bled. His father, when he came home, was a gentle giant of a man, standing 6'4" in height and weighing 17-1/2 stone. His mother, daughter of a wealthy family, had drawn from her education at the Clyde school a love of the piano and literature, and liked to paint. As the boys grew older Jack enjoyed the camping and comradeship he found in the Boy Scouts, took to football, cricket and dancing. George had quieter tastes - he and his mates read a lot, or shut themselves away in his room at the back of the house to draw. At weekends the brother and his friends would go to the flicks - threepence to get in; a penny to spend.

24 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 'I'd say we were a pretty happy family', Jack Johnston, the real-life brother Jack, said in the interview in 1980, still puzzling at the portrait his brother had painted of his parents, and of his father in particular. 'Not that I'd say we were close, in the sense of doing everything together. We each had our friends, but we were happy. And I can never understand the way he described our father - there were no cross words, or very few, from him, and he never laid a hand on us - he probably should have, at times, but he didn't! And he never terrorised my mother. The way George portrayed our father was cruel.' One is left to conclude that George Johnston may have been wiser to have changed all names at least and perhaps some reference points in the novel, rather than littering it with the touchstones of real life.

Later, attending Brighton Technical School, as Jack had done, George showed growing skill in sketching and draughtsmanship - he loved to draw. And he was proving an adept soccer player, later being selected in the Australian Youth Soccer Team. Jack, by this time was riding a motor-bike, chasing girls, haunting the billiard tables that lay behind barber's shops - pursuits in which George didn't follow him. As a teenager, Jack cleared out from home to work in the bush at Pampanio, near Horsham in central Victoria. Jack Johnston has described it, and again we can hear the ghosting of events that George Johnston has adapted to make his account of Jack's Depression years in the novel:

'I was looking for a bit of adventure. 1 drove a team of eight horses, on the plough, on discing. 1 played open-age football up there when 1 was sixteen, with these big bush-buggers. George stored that away - things I'd done that he could't do. I used to box too, and I'd try to kid him to be my sparring-partner, but no - he was useless ... We were different. I could fix anything - George couldn't drive a nail. 1 took after Dad in that, he took after Mum with her piano playing and paintings. I'd be out with girls, but he was shy, wouldn't mix with them. Yet, the girls thought he was - well, spunky, they'd say to-day.'

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 25 When he was fifteen, George Johnston left school and was apprenticed to the commercial artist at the lithography firm of Troedel and Cooper, then in Bank Place in Melbourne. One of the older artists in the studio, old Degenhardt, used to find relief from his more mundane work on jam labels and calendars by drifting in his lunch-time down to the Little Wharf - long since gone - where sailing ships used to pull in on the Yarra close to the throbbing heart of the city near King Street. George Johnston took to accompanying him, learned the fascination of the Tasmanian ships close in or the larger square­ rigged ships from the other side of the world that came to berth down-river. Soon Johnston was keen to sketch them, but even keener to get their stories from skippers or watchmen. Eventually the world of the wharves enthralled him, he interviewed seaman and researched ships' histories and produced articles at home, finally submitting one to the Morning Post, a newspaper in the stable of the Melbourne Argus. It was published; payment five guineas. Although Johnston was still working as a commercial artist for Troedel and Cooper, where for a time his brother Jack worked also as a storeman, and although he continued to trundle at night up to the Museum and Art Gallery buildings in Swanston Street to take art classes, paid for by his employers, in drawing and painting at the National Gallery Art School, he had found something more alluring - the researching and writing of feature articles. For a teenage birthday his grandmother gave him some money. With it he bought a typewriter. Through 1928 and 1929 his articles, signed 'Stunsail', continued to sell. In contradistinction to the fictional account of My Brother Jack, his parents were proud to see the evidence of this new talent and the confidence that it was building in him. His brother Jack had cajoled George Johnston into playing Australian Rules football for the South Caulfield club. Both brothers proved to be good at the game, George in his slightly-built style playing on the half-forward flank, Jack a utility player and vice-captain of the team. Both brothers were invited to train with the League team St. Kilda, but neither proved good enough to make the first eighteen. George was also a natural sprinter - so good that a professional coach offered to train him. But his growing freelance journalistic work left little time for it, although he did run twice in the heats of the famous Stawell Gift. Steeped in the world of the old ships, but taking on wider material in his spare time, George had already re-christened 'Avalon', his childhood home. He named it 'Loch lid', after the ship in which his grandfather had come to Australia from Scotland in the nineteenth century and whose sailing history he had researched. As the 1930's progressed the effects of the Depression began to bite into the Johnstons as into many other Australian family. Jack, and his new bride, Patricia, were living hand-to-mouth on whatever work Jack could find. He did fruit-picking at Shepparton. He sold honey door to door. He worked as a cook for a road-gang at Poowong in South Gippsland. Later, he sold fruit and vegetables - bought at the Melbourne markets at three in the morning - from a Dodge cut down and made into a truck, for old man Tolley from Collingwood, doing a daylight run from Melbourne to Traralgon then across the Strezlecki ranges through Gormandale and down to Yarram and Port Albert where Tolley's son was a fisherman. He and the old man then backloaded fish to Melbourne, selling as they went. They split the proceeds, gaining perhaps thirty 26 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 shillings each. 'Enough to keep the family in food for another week or so,' Jack Johnston recalls in 1980:

But it was only a winding gravel and corduroy road over the mountains and gawd, I tell you, I could write a book on my experiences in that. There was old Tolley sitting up on the running board whistling as loud as he could as went down these mountain bends - there was no horn on the truck. Another time the front wheel came off and I see it rolling down the road in front of me! At first another couple shared a rented house with us - we had to find 10/- each to pay the rent. I'd cut Mum's lawns and get some of it, Pat would do their watering, and we'd put the money we got from that with the IO/6d a week Susso money. Later all the unemployed went on strike for the right to work for money rather than just degrading coupons. I worked in gardens. We worked in the Hopetoun Gardens at Balaclava Junction, and we'd get twenty-one shillings a week for 28 hours work each fortnight. By then that had to do for Mum and two kids. On Friday nights I'd play poker with some of the spare money - I'd always win and bring home a few bob more. But coupons were degrading - you had coupons earmarked for bread, or for groceries, or for meat. We went hungry a few times to feed the kids. We made dampers of only flour and water and put them in the oven. Or, sometimes there would be a week when all we had was bread and onions. On your 7 /6d you couldn't buy luxuries like butter. It'd be Golden Syrup, Treacle. In the winter it was cold. I used to rig up a bike tube to by-pass the meter on the gas and get the house warmed up. And I think George mentions the black coats in the novel - army coats dyed black. You could get them up at the Town Hall, and some vegetables. But there were others worse off than us with more kids, who'd lost their houses.'

In the meantime, life was taking George Johnston in other directions. When the Morning Star newspaper had advertised for cadet journalists in 1929 he applied. The Argus editor, Norm McCance, suggested he withdraw his application. McCance found him a place on The Argus. His long-time colleague, Geoffrey Hutton, a model for Gavin Turley in My Brother Jack, recalled him at that threshold to the 1930's and to the career that was to take his prime energy and attention for the next 24 years:

'When he arrived as a cadet reporter on the old Argus, George Johnston was a thin, jumpy young man carrying an enormous head of steam. There was no stopping him. In the humble job of shipping reporter he ran faster, talked to more ships' captains and collected more stories than anyone else ... He was a fast talker and an avid listener, a man who could sense a story and frame it before he approached his battered and over-worked typewriter. When he was hot after an idea he would type like a hand drill, biting his fingernails and smoking his way through cigarettes by the packet. He was always impatient to write, to hammer out his story to a dramatic finish.'

By the time the Depression had reached its depths and his brother Jack's struggles were at their fiercest, George Johnston was earning ten pounds a week - a good salary then, when the Basic Wage was still under four pounds. He lived a non-stop round of interviewing and production of articles, driving around Melbourne in his small car. In 1934 he married Else Taylor, a girl from Elsternwick, and not long after the couple settled at the new Mackie Grove Estate in Brighton - the model for the fictional suburb of Beverley Grove, depicted in My Brother Jack as the background to David Meredith's rebellion agains suburban competition and conformity. The irregular life of the jouralist put strains on the marriage. As the 1930's progressed Johnston's brief had expanded from shipping rounds and court reporting to weightier assignments. The move to the Argus had years ago spelt the end of George's football, and he saw his brother Jack less and less frequently. WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 27 No-one knew better than a journalist with his constant oversight of world affairs just what the news from Europe portended as the end of the decade approached. When war with Germany was declared in 1939 George Johnston and Geoffrey Hutton were among the first official War Correspondents accredited by the Australian Government - hitherto accreditation had been to the British Government. Johnston's first book was Grey Gladiator, the story of HMAS Sydney, written in a burst of concentration in ten days and published in 1941. He was also travelling Australia gathering material on the home front for the News and Information Bureau. From it he produced a book, Australia at War, which was designed to present Australia's potential American allies with a picture of Australians girding their loins for conflict. In the early stages of the war he was writing material for the Melbourne Age as well as for the Argus, and moving about a great deal. During this period he met Charmian Clift, a girl from the New South Wales south coast town of Kiama, who was serving in the ack-ack as Bombardier Clift in Melbourne. They met again, and then continued corresponding as the war took them in different directions. In January 1942 Johnston was posted to New Guinea, sending back vivid despatches from Port Moresby during the crucial year in which the 6,000 Australian Troops in 'Emu' Force battled with the Japanese for control of Papua along the Kokoda Trail and finally captured Gona at its northern end. Grim and detailed as his despatches were, there was much they could not tell or which was censored out, some of it by the Americans. From these reports Johnston wrote New Guinea Diary, published in 1943. Johnston's first-hand experience with the Australian and American forces led him to be very critical of General Douglas Macarthur, the American General who was Allied Commander in the South-West Pacific. Johnston, who at times travelled with the Macarthur retinue, began to realize that Macarthur's communiques omitted, or limited reference to, hard fighting and victories borne by Australian troops. Macarthur also censored reports so as to suggest that he had been to the New Guinea battle area on previous occasions. Some time after the New Guinea campaign, as his son Martin attests, George Johnston received a signed photograph of Macarthur in the mail. On it Macarthur had written: 'I shall return and get you, you bastard.' (In 1979, thirty-seven years after he had written it, and nine years after his death, the full handwritten original of Johnston's New Guinea diary was found in a pile of books being prepared for sale in New York. It was bought by the National Library in Canberra, and published as War Diary 1942 in 1984, enabling Australians to read a fuller version of Johnston's observations of the New Guinea campaigns). From scenes of death amid the mud and leeches of the Kokoda Trail, and the deep Kunai grass of Papua, Johnston was called next to the front in Burma. From his observations of air transport command in North Assam he was to write, years later, his novel The Far Side of the Moon (1964). He was sent to the United States to write further material to cement the Australian-American alliance, which gave issue in the books Pacific Partner and Skyscrapers in the Mist in 1944. He was posted to China, where in 1943-44 he met Chou En Lai and Mao Tse Tung and travelled with the Red Army for part of its long fight against the Japanese. He came away with great admiration for the Chinese

28 WESTERLY. No. I, MARCH, 1987 Communist regime, while being convinced that the Kuomintang had deliberately undermined and bled the Chinese economy -- all things for which he tried to argue in his journalistic accounts, only to find that the political climate in the Allied camp made it impossible to publish them. In fact, among his journalist and War Correspondent colleagues, he was jokingly dubbed 'Georgie the Sword' for his proselytising about what the communist regime was achieving in China. It was a passion, and a deeply-disturbing set of experiences that he carried with him until 1962, when he gave it to the world in his haunting but unfortunately much undervalued novel, The Far Road. The Americans also sent Johnston into Tibet, ostensibly on behalf of the Kuomintang to help arrange supplies of horses for the Chinese army. We have only his cryptic and veiled way of alluding to the expedition when he spoke of it to his son Martin to suggest that it also may have had an intelligence purpose. Towards the end of the war Johnston found himself posted to Italy after the Mussolini regime had capitulated. He made a brief visit to Greece, a country in a state of chaos and treacherous civil war after the departure of the German armies. Johnston's highly-trained skill in observing, questioning, and noting detail meant that he committed it to memory as well as filing stories on the strange, unsettling period that dogged the end of such bitter battles in Europe. From these almost empathic and visual memories he was later able to draw further books in the post war years. Jack's war was rather different. He had three serial numbers during the conflict. Living in Brighton before the war he discovered that by joining the militia he could have the weekend benefits of the Privates Mess (wet), in the local drill hall. He had not been a member of the 45th Battalion more than a month when war was declared, and privileges cut out. He enlisted in another unit, the 2/22nd Battalion, at Royal Park, and set about qualifying in Motor Mechanics in order to transfer to the Armoured Corps. But in training for the high jump in the Battalion Sports at Puckapunyal he injured his knee, was hospitalized in Heidelberg Military Hospital, and was discharged as B class. Two weeks of civilian life was enough for him. He enlisted again as B class in the Pay Corps, and made application to be reclassified A, but was refused. Working as an Army Clerk in Swanston Street, Melbourne, he managed to get to the medical files on the floor above and tore up his own record sheets. A medical Board then reclassified him 'A'. He was listed to embark with a corps of tradesmen for Singapore, but as their departure was delayed he was sent back to his earlier battalion at Puckapunyal. This proved to be his good fortune. The corps who were sent to Singapore soon after were captured by the Japanese at the fall of the island - very few of the men survived the war. Later, when the fortunes of war were clearly turning in favour of the Americans and the Australians, Jack was attached to Headquarters Northern Territory Force at Larrakeh and was sent to inspect the many abandoned military camps in the Northern Territory set up earlier in preparation for the Brisbane Line strategy. In a Chevrolet ute he travelled the Territory compiling an inventory of the refrigerators, huts, motors, compressors and other equipment that would now never be used militarily. So Jack Johnston's war ended without him firing a shot in anger.

WESTERLY, No.1, MARCH, 1987 29 During the period of enforced separation from 1939 until 1945, George Johnston's marriage to Else had faltered and eventually failed. In 1946, Johnston, who had written for Time magazine during the war, spent some time working for that magazine and the Saturday Evening Post in America. On his return he and Charmain Clift married. Charmain had finished the war a Captain at Melbourne Land Headquarters, had begun writing and publishing short stories while in the Army, and soon after discharge was working for the Argus as a journalist. George joined her there for a time. Johnston, still the frenetic journalist, also served as editor of the Australian Post. Late in 1946 the couple moved to Sydney to work for the Sydney Sun, living in a flat in Bondi, revelling in a city of sun and liveliness, savouring the new cosmopolitan flavour that Darlinghurst and the Cross had developed after the war. All of this was a foil for what both saw as the dowdiness, provincialism and philistinism of Melbourne. And was it not in Melbourne that there had always been a certain 'known-nothing', xenophobic reaction to George's enthusiasm for China and its new regime? And was Sydney not a second home as it were, for Charmian who had moved there from Kiama as a resourceful fifteen year-old girl with hopes of being a cabaret-singer, but had instead worked as a nurse, as theatre usherette, as a model, and as a service-station attendant until the war intervened? Even so, for George there were moments of nostalgia for the old Argus. From 1947, George Johnston and Charmian Clift began to collaborate as writers. By the time their first son Martin was born in November they were well advanced on a novel arising from George's long-stored but sharp memories of Tibet. George, drawing on these, wrote pages at high speed, which Charmian would then revise and polish. The result, published as High Valley in 1948, won the Sydney Morning Herald literary prize. In 1949 the J ohnstons' daughter Shane was born. Sydney was not to claim the Johnstons long. In 1950 George was asked to manage the European Bureau for Australian Associated Newspapers, owners of the Sydney Sun. The job was based in London, and so George Johnston fare welled Australia, not realizing that he would not return to it for fourteen years - that he would experience the archetypal expatriation so common among Australian artists and writers. Both George and Charmian recalled many years later that they were quite eager to leave the antipodes at the time. 'I didn't like Australia a bit', Charmian said in an interview in 1965:

'It had to me that very nasty feeling of post-war. I thought it was money-grabbing and greedy - all the values that I thought were important didn't seem to be there any more ... I remember sailing out and waving goodbye to the Harbour Bridge and thinking "I'll never see that again".'

From their London flat in Notting Hill Gate, George Johnston and Charmian collaborated to produce a novel set in China, The Big Chariot (1953), George again providing the exotic detail and Charmian polishing. George renewed acquaintanceship with Europe in the course of his work, visiting Italy, France, Austria and Germany, and making a brief stop in Greece. That and his growing yearning to break from journalism and deadlines conspired to sow the idea of Greece in his mind. He paid it another brief visit. Then, a friend took him to

30 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 hear the production tape of a BBC radio programme about Greek sponge­ divers. That was the catalyst. With the idea of becoming a full-time novelist, he took Charmian, Martin and Shane away from the cocktail round, the claustrophobia and fog of London, to a place, as he told his sister-in-law Pat - 'where the sun shines 16 hours a day' - the Greek island of Kalymnos. Renting a house, the family stayed there a year. George and Charmain followed up their intention of writing about the island's divers; George produced a story 'Sponge Boat' and by 1955 they had published their joint novel The Sponge Divers. It sold well, with its Mediterranean setting and detail of what human interactions lay behind the almost mystical voyages of the Kalymnos boats to seek sea-sponge on the ocean floor near the African coast. Collaboration, however, was proving more and more difficult. Charmian, steeped in literature since childhood, was developing her own identity as a writer. By the time the Johnstons had moved to the island of Hydra, and finally bought the house they had rented above the harbour for £120 gold pounds, she was well advanced with her own first book, Mermaids Singing, an account of their year on Kalymnos. Later in 1955 George produced his other Mediterranean novel, The Cyprian Woman. In 1956 the Johnston's second son, Jason, was born - a baby delivered without recourse to the hospitals and doctors in Athens. He was brought into the world by a midwife on the island, with some makeshift antiseptic and a bottle of ouzo as anaesthetic for Charmain. As the late 1950's rolled towards a new decade the pattern of the Johnstons' life on the island had become set. When they had first arrived they were only the second group of 'outsiders' on Hydra. But othersjoined them - the painter Sydney Nolan (with whom George had gone to school in distant Brighton, Melbourne, Australia) and his wife Cynthia, the writers Cedric and Pat Flower, the artist William Pownall, the film actor, Peter Finch. By their third year, the expatriate artistic community living about the J ohnstons in the steep streets of white-walled houses running up from the harbour-side numbered up to thirty people - actors, anthropologists, the Irish novelist Patrick Greer, and his painter wife Nancy, the Norwegian writer Axel Jensen and his wife, and later, when the community was reaching into the hundreds, Leonard Cohen the poet, and some of the early beatnik artists and writers. Martin and Shane had attended a Montessori school in London. Now they continued the Greek schooling they had begun on Kalymnos. And while they were at school in the morning, learning in the Greek language which settled on their tongues much more effortlessly than it did for their parents, George and Charmian wrote. Sometimes it was their own novels, sometimes it was further collaborations like The Darkness Outside, (1960), in which George brought forth in words the interest in archaelogical research on the Tigris and Eyuphrates river valleys that had been a passion with Charmian for some time. Sometimes it was the 'Shane Martin' detective series produced by George for the quick-sale American market to gain some constant earnings to keep the family. Sometimes it was novels written at a higher level - such as Closer to the Sun (1960) and The Far Road (1962) which prefigured events and characters, particularly the pivotal protagonist David Meredith, that were to assume much greater importance in George Johnston's later writing.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 31 Photograph courtesy of Martin Johnston.

In the late morning each day the Johnstons, with a growing retinue offellow­ expatriates, would walk down the narrow streets to the port and settle into the back of Katsikas' taverna, then a small grocery store, where the retsina and sherry began to flow and the problems of the world were discussed. For George Johnston this hard-drinking, hard-smoking afternoon and night philosophising had become the essence. Even so, the two journalists, with their training in production to deadlines, managed to write regularly while others in the Katsikas' circle often failed to produce much at all. But again, behind the outgoing and liberated veneer, the Johnstons were poor, and often rendered poorer by their unfailing hospitality to visitors. Their earnings from each new book, short story, magazine article were no sooner made than spent to reduce their credit accounts with Katsikas and others. Charmian Clift's second novel, Peel Me a Lotus (1959), and several stories by both writers included in the recent collection, Strong Man From Piraeus, edited by Garry Kinnane, 1984, add depth to our picture of the infatuation in George Johnston with things Greek and with the expatriate life. Johnston's reaction amused his friend Sidney Nolan, at least in the early years on Hydra. 'He was awestruck by Homer and Ancient Greek culture - a bit rarified about it,' said Nolan in an interview in 1982. 'But I used to tease him about them. I told him they were only

32 WESTERLY, ~o. I, MARCH, 1987 horse breakers. In a way I was being loyal to my own culture ... ' So the Johnstons' island life continued until 1958. George Johnston, still smoking heavily, was clearly not well and often battled for breath. He was persuaded to go to Athens for a medical examination. His story 'The Verdict', begun in that year and completed some time later, describes the experience. In Athens, Johnston learned that he had tuberculosis, but was reassured that it could be contained. His son Martin has always regarded this as an erroneously optimistic mis-diagnosis. It meant that Johnston lived on in Greece for a further five years which may have been better spent closer to specialised medical help. But as Martin Johnston would be the first to admit, it is easy to be wise after the event. In the case of someone as sensitive and inner-driven as his father it often seems that it might have been true that he was following a tragic script for the direction his life and work were to take, a script which he had written almost in spite of himself. The years 1958 to 1964 were certainly a turning point in Johnston's life - and the change they brought in him made him complete as a writer. That change is what produced his novel My Brother Jack. Until that time, as his wife Charmian knew with an intimacy of detail denied to others, George Johnston's facility with words had combined with his journalist's eye for detail and atmosphere to produce a steady stream of writing. Johnston was clearly someone of great personal uncertainty and complexity - from several sources, we have a picture of him in unguarded moments, cigarette burning in one corner of his mouth, and his teeth chewing on bleeding fingernails in the other. His writing until 1958 had been calculated to leave his own personality untouched in favour of exotic detail and the fascination of historic events. As Charmian noted perceptively in an article in 1969,long after Johnston's coming into the light:

'His purpose was not always to say what he knows. In his leaping time - trench coat, beret, dressing-gown by De Pinna, pig-skin luggage, passport fabulously stamped with nearly every country in the world - he was inclined to hide what he knew, suspected, was troubled by, behind a glitteringly competent dazzle of professional observation ... '

But from the time of the verdict of the doctor in Athens, knowing that his life was to be curtailed, Johnston began a personal and professional reappraisal lit at its edges by a new and deadly sense of urgency. In his story 'The Verdict', he speaks very much for himself and from the heart through the person of David Meredith. In that story we find for the first time in print, the deeper levels of his anguish as a physically frail man and a writer. There is first the admission that he has felt the need to write something other than journalism, pulp novels, or what at most were compelling and exotic pot-boilers.

Early in the story Meredith thinks that the doctor's verdict may indicate that his life will be so short 'that he would no longer have to try to tilt his blunted little lances at those windmills on the hill of contemporary writing'; that his sexual inadequacy (dictated by his weakening physical condition) with his wife Cressida, as well as his nightly retreat to liquor, 'would be taken out of his hands now.' But they are not. He comes from the doctor's rooms with a suspended

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 33 death-sentence, as it were, knowing 'that nothing had been resolved, and that he had to begin all over again'. As often happens in the writing process, George Johnston had had in mind since the early 1980's the idea for a book centering on his brother. He even got to the stage of writing a short story with the title 'My Brother Jack'. It was the germ of the opening section of the novel, Martin Johnston attests, but the story has been lost. By 1958, as we have seen, not only the narrator David Meredith, but also his tone of voice, his world-view, his self-probing, all later to become familiar to readers of My Brother Jack, were already developing in the story 'The Verdict'. In Closer to the Sun (1960) Meredith reappears, but not yet in his classic, self-revelatory form. Nevertheless, as Charmian Clift said of it later, it was half-way honest on the way to complete honesty - 'that is,' she added, 'honest for half its length, when obviously uncertainty engulfed him (George Johnston) and he retreated into story-line and the old trick of dazzling obervation.' Then in 1962 Charmain nagged her husband, in her words, 'into writing a novel about two men, a jeep and 100,000 corpses.' 'I believe,' she recollected in an article in 1969, 'that it sold all of eighty-two copies in Australia. But that doesn't really matter now (although it did at the time, naturally). What matters is that he set down, as truly as he could, an experience that had shattered him.' The novel was The Far Road, and it is the story, told by that particular sort of writer called the novelist, of the terrible moral dilemma in which another particular sort of writer, the journalist, can find himself in seeking out the truth. It describes how Johnston and a less experienced wartime journalist colleague stumbled in 1945 on the cynical manipUlation of news releases by some Chinese bankers in the city of K weilin in northern Kiangsi Province, so that the bankers could make a killing on the currency market. The effect of their deception was to panic the entire population of K weilin to flee an imagined invation by the Japanese and to die, almost to a person, of starvation and exhaustion in the dry valley between K weilin and the Linchow railhead. It was the sort of haunting war-time experience Johnston had talked about in his long ramblings deep into the night on Hydra with companions like Sidney and Cynthia Nolan, (Cynthia thought he drank, smoked and talked to excess!) with Peter Finch, with Cedric and Pat Flower. How could, how should a journalist report such enormities when they redounded on the Allied side, when the military censors would probably squash the account, when the events themselves meant nothing in the wider theatres of the war? It was the first of Johnston's agonies, the first of his perceived failings, that he had set down in detail. It remained one of his favourites among his books. From 1960 onwards, Johnston had talked more and more of the book he planned to write about his brother. Already some sketches for it, like a painter's sketches for a portrait, were going on paper. The National Library, Canberra, holds a commonplace book with ideas for My Brother Jack, small notebooks, shopping lists, on which the concept of the novel eked forward, against the time when The Far Road should be complete. By 1963 Johnston was imbued with the book, and with the details of a country, Australia, about which he had not written since early in the war, and even then not in this intensely personal and self-revealing way. But when The Far Road was a commercial failure, despite

34 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 gaining good reviews, he felt he had to write another money-spinner. It was The Far Face of the Moon, set in Burma and Assam during the war, when pilots had to fly perilous missions over the Hump with supplies or on intelligence sorties. Then Johnston was able to return to his Australian novel. Martin Johnston remembers his parents talking for hours almost every day about Australia, a country he himself scarcely knew, checking impressions, checking dates, names, places, the way things were done, 'recreating' the Australian past in their minds. When the writing began in earnest George Johnston wrote each morning, then revised by reading what he had written to Charmian, seeking her reactions, corrections to detail, criticisms. It became an established method. 'In fact,' wrote Charmian later, 'while My Brother Jack was being written I sat on the step by his desk every day for seven months so that I would be there when I was wanted for discussion or suggestion or maybe only to listen.' For Johnston the writing was a deeply personal statement even though fictionalized. And always beside him, looking over his shoulder, was his gnawing illness, the corruption in his lungs that he resented and railed against. His illness and the periodical bitterness it aroused in him brought his marriage close to an end several times. Despite these things, Johnston had a new purpose, a new direction. Charmian had learned to give him the streptomycin injections necessary to hold his TB in check. He wrote on, this time with no deadline, no calculation for commercial success. In this, his twenty-fifth book, he was beginning a fictional analysis, a fictional reassessment of his own life, something he had always felt he had the time to postpone in earlier years. First, there was a sense of having misspent his life, of having failed to produce the worthwhile fiction of which he was capable, with having to pursue journalism and quick-sale fiction of immediate appeal in order to make money. And now, looking back, as he confides in Clean Straw For Nothing, he saw that perhaps the prize of fame and public attention had come to him too early in life, and that, as he had said to Hugh Atkinson, a fellow writer, he had in a sense been steadily paying for that prize throughout his later life in reduced satisfaction. 'I meant by that,' Johnston said in an interview in 1969, 'the irrecapturable rapture of being young - there's nothing quite like it. Nothing that happens afterwards is ever as good as those years, which for most people - for me, anyway - came between 25 and 35.' While he wrote My Brother Jack Johnston could see its genesis in earlier attempts, but could not forsee quite where the book would take him. But the process in itself was fascinating. He had made three attempts before to conceive David Meredith as a fictionalized self-view. 'But the first time I lost my nerve and the character turned out not to be me at all,' he said in retrospect in 1969, 'and the second time I made him older than I was at the time in the hope of getting more mature reactions from him. Yes, they were better people than I was all the time,' he added significantly. 'I shrank back because I was afraid to face myself, and also reluctant to face my thoughts about Australia, I suppose. It was a pretty long and painful process before I managed to do both in My Brother Jack.' Johnston was also fascinated by his memory's fecundity once he has set it the task of recreating the Australia of his childhood and the career of himself and his brother Jack and a myriad of personal and professional acquaintances. He was discovering as he wrote what other writers, especially

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 35 expatriates, have attested to - that it is often better to be writing at a distance in time and space from one's subject. In this case it was his first novel about Australia, written 10,000 miles from its subject, on a Greek island. In his run­ on thinking in an interview immediately on his return to Australia in March 1964, Johnston expressed it thus:

'A lot of people have questioned this curious aspect of it, of being able to write an entirely Australian novel, because it is entirely set in Melbourne, from that sort of long remove in time and space, but I've always felt that when one is looking back on a thing, and you must remember this novel is to some degree autobiographical and certainly there is a nostalgic looking back on a past time, 1 think in a way this can be done rather better from this long remove because there is nothing of the present Australia intruding on the scene; one sees it perhaps a little bit out of true, out of perspective, but with a sort of queer clarity, almost a dreamlike clarity in a way, and it's terribly odd, the moment one sets oneself the exercise of examining this past time; in the beginning it is very very difficult indeed and then as you rather painfully evoke some early image it seems to breed the other early images and a most extraordinary chain of memories is in some curious way revived, sometimes quite frightening, and you find details seem to come up from some bottomless pond that one had for decades utterly forgotten - the names of people, their appearance, the clothes they wore, the streets, the little shops where one bought those long-vanished sweets, nullanullas and silver sammies and lamp posts and licorice sticks and so on, and all this comes up, and it comes up in a very fresh and strangely vivid way.'

When My Brother Jack was published early in 1964 its launching at the Adelaide Festival brought George Johnston back to Australia. Even though he knew he had written a book of greater depth than anything he had done hitherto, he was astounded at the warmth of the book's reception. In the story of an Australian family -largely his family - between the wars he had touched on a nerve of Australians enquiries about themselves and how they had come to be as they were. It was also the patent honesty of the account, which was at bottom Johnston's honesty about himself when seen against his brother and others, which won the hearts of Australian readers. 'Perhaps he thought,' wrote his wife five years later of his approach to the book at the time of writing, 'that if people didn't like what he was and what he thought and what he felt they could bloody well lump him. The necessity to charm, to please, to entertain, to be approved ... dropped out of him like so much unwanted baggage ... ' The book won Australia's most prestigious prize for the novel - the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Of course, readers became aware of the close parallels between Jack Johnston and the brother Jack of the novel, between George Johnston and his narrator, David Meredith, between Charmian and the Cressida of the novel. Only the novelist could unravel the complex threads that joined fact and fiction, but even he, once his creation had developed a life of its own, was hard put to do so down to the last detail. 'I must quickly point out,' he said in a radio talk about his work in 1964:

'I must quickly point out that ... 1 honestly do not believe that 1 was quite so treacherous a young man or so gifted for betrayal and self-interest and opportunism, but it was necessary to draw the Davey character in this way to build up the almost tragic irony of the final situation where Davey becomes his brother Jack's hero, and also to point out the contrast with Jack's honesty, guts and in a real sense his uncomplicated nobility.'

36 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 In August 1964, the rest of his family followed George Johnston back to Australia, as assisted migrants. Johnston had spied out the country of his birth and youth and found it much changed - and for the better. The others were pleased to return except for Martin, whose life, since he had departed Australia as a three year-old, had belonged to, and been nurtured by London, Britain, Europe, but most strongly by Greece, Greek language, Greek culture. The house in Hydra was sold, and by 1965 the family was settled in Sydney. They bought the narrow, two-storey house in Raglan Street, Mosman that was to be their home till 1970. In the remainder of 1964 and through 1965, still smoking heavily and supporting his creative drive with liquor, Johnston was very busy on a myriad of money-making jobs - freelance journalism, documentary films, editing of coffee-table books. Even before his family had joined him in Australia he was writing an open letter to them published in Australian newspapers, about the changes in his homeland, about which he had an almost child-like enthusiasm, as he travelled the country and reported what he discovered. Since before leaving Hydra, Johnston had realized that the personal story he wished to write, which My Brother Jack had begun by ghosting in fiction facets of Australian recent history between the wars, would extend beyond to encompass his life in Greece, and would entail two novels, if not a trilogy. By the time he was travelling Australia, all expenses paid, in 1964, he could see roughly how it should go - My Brother Jack had treated the Australian growing up; its sequel should treat the Australian expatriate; and the third novel would recount the Australian's return, because, as he said, in 1964, 'I find a certain fascination in this retention of Australian character under all these changing values and changing circumstances in the changing pattern of time'. By 1965 Johnston was something of a household word as journalist and writer in his own country, travelling with his friend, the painter Russell (,Tassie') Drysdale, through far western New South Wales, collaborating with Robert Goodman on The Australians, a coffee-table book that made a comprehensive mid-decade assessment of the country and its people. Johnston was also working on the sequel to My Brother Jack but without satisfaction or success. He worked in the cluttered Mosman house, the telephone buried under a detritus of books, shelves carrying Greek ikons and other memories of Hydra. He was doing an 'upside down ... Alice In Wonderland thing', as he said, writing now about the Greek island from Australia, from the other end of the world. But the form necessary to his story still eluded him. The constant activity had its sombre costs. In 1965 he was hospitalized more than once for treatment and chest surgery. Then in 1966 he developed double pneumonia, was X-rayed in hospital in Sydney, and told that his right lung, not his left as he had been led to believe, was riddled with tuberculosis. He had the choice of staying in hospital on drugs for five years or of even more drastic surgery. The family moved to a cramped flat in Neutral Bay so as to be nearby and Johnston underwent surgery. His right lung was removed. He was in the Royal North Shore Hospital for a year, sometimes close to death, but later working on the proofs of The Australians, and grappling again with his novel Clean Straw For Nothing, and still managing to smoke and drink - friends smuggled cigarettes and whisky to his hospital room. He relished being able to work on two jobs

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 37 - The Australians and the novel - moving from one to the other when either proved obdurate. But now Clean Straw was developing a life of its own. In hospital he began to understand how he had to handle the story - in a series of vignettes, displaced in place and time, sometimes narrated by David Meredith, sometimes observing him as a victim of the Gods in third person - vignettes which resonated and echoed off one another, and told the story of his return to civilian life in the mean Melbourne of 1945; the end of his marriage; of its antithesis with Cressida Morley; of his intervening years as journalist and editor; of Athens; of London in 1950; of Europe post-war; of the islands in Greece in 1956 and recollections of it from a new and changed Australia in the 1960's; of the period of 'The Verdict' again, the chilling decision upon his health handed down by a Greek doctor; of jealousy of his wife Cressida; of suspicion that she is having affairs behind his back; of Hydra's foreign colony of artists and its distractions; 'the run of seasons', as Johnston wrote, 'and the poetries of rock and water and rain and sun and light and fire' under the Aegean sun; of expatriate musings and philosophising; of the certainty that his wife has had an affair with a friend on the island during his absence under medical treatment in Athens; of thoughts of a return to journalism in London; but tottering from lamp-post to lamp-post in Fleet Street, struggling for breath, realizing that his knowledge of events and his contacts have evaporated after eight years away from newspapers 'supping on the poetic lotus' in Greece, as a former colleague puts it; of bitterness towards his wife, of flaring public quarrels, and the slow turn towards acceptance and trust again; knowing that he could not in 'the rigour and peril of going on', proceed without her; of Evangeli's little grocery store with his back nook of aromatic clutter, and a decision made through all the bitterness and confusion that they should return to Australia with their children; of the whirl forward in time to a hospital bed in Sydney, and David Meredith's recollection of the flight to Australia, of returning to his birthplace. Despite his trials and long periods in hospital, following his return to Australia, despite the creative lull and confused casting about after the publication of My Brother Jack, George Johnston was far more involved than he had ever been in the theory of the novelist's craft. His son Martin, now his sounding board in place of Charmian Clift, was able to observe it. His father often spoke not only with other writers, but with painters, film-makers and friends about Conrad, Henry James, Borges, Ionesco, Seferis, Kafka, and how these writers gained their effects. He could see himself now as struggling and enquiring within the tradition of the serious novel, especially in the writing of Clean Straw For Nothing with its juxtaposition of time, place and person, and was excited by the discoveries in technique he made for himself in pushing the trilogy forward. He was reading more fiction and poetry than he had done hitherto. George Johnston loved nothing better than long talks, often extending with the lubrication of liquor into the small hours. His early journalistic colleagues such as Rohan Rivett, Richard Hughes, Lou Kepert of the Sun-Herald, Fred Peterson, Nigel Palethorpe, Harry Kippax, Geoffrey Hutton and others, had been supplanted in the years in Greece by old friends such as Sidney Nolan, Peter Finch, Cedric and Pat Flower and others. And now, since his return to

38 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 Sydney he sat round the table or the fireside with several painter friends at various times, foremost among them Tassie and Maisie Drysdale, Ray and June Crooke, Donald Friend. Painters, he maintained, were better people with whom to mull over life than were writers. In fact, he'd say, instancing Donald Friend, painters were often better writers than writers, although in the 1960's in Sydney he saw a lot of writers like Thomas Keneally and J.D. Pringle, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and Charmian's editor, as well as other journalists. An ABC film, released in 1967, of which Johnston and Drysdale were the focal points, captures the writer and the painter talking, Johnston pitifully thin, his lean hand fingering a cigarette or toying with a stubby, as they sit in the firelit lounge of the long Drysdale house above the ocean at Bouddi Farm, talking on into the darkness about the strange continuity of being; about the nature of experience; about the role of suffering in life, and what it does to people; about the problem of procrastination common to painter and writer; about Johnston's early progress with Clean Straw; about Australian composers like Peter Sculthorpe; about the Australian mistaken habit of reckoning everything in life in terms of its cost. Finally, procrastination over (or more correctly, subconscious problem-solving done) Drysdale produces his portrait of Johnston - a thin, dour, indomitable man, eroded by illness and suffering, and with further suffering to come. While Johnston was writing Clean Straw For Nothing ('Drunk for One Penny: Dead Drunk for Tuppence: Clean Straw For Nothing,' said a street sign in Gin Lane, London, in Hogarth's time), Charmian Clift had been writing her very popular weekly essay for the Melbourne Herald and the Sydney Morning Herald, and at the same time was writing the script adaptation of My Brother Jack for an ABC television mini-series. She was also, of course, performing the tasks of mother, wife, housekeeper. There were difficulties, too, with the script of My Brother Jack. George Johnston's mother was still alive and the Johnston family - especially Jack and his wife Pat - insisted that the script should not show her husband (the father of Jack and George) to be the dictatorial and sometimes cruel figure he had been made out to be in the novel. It was only when these aspects of the character had been written out of the television script that Jack and Pat Johnston felt they could sign the releases for the series to go to air. They talked also to Nick Tait, who played the part of Davey Meredith in the television series, and who was disturbed at the degree of self-denigration that Johnston had written into the character - a self-denigration that in part reflected Johnston's own agonized self-image. Charmian Clift had never been able to bring herself to step-sit, as she had done during the writing of his earlier novels, to act as sounding-board for Johnston's reading aloud of his progress on Clean Straw For Nothing. Her time was precious, but even more than that the novel's material which touched her brief affairs with other people on Hydra was personally too distressing to face, even though she acquiesced in Johnston's determined view that its inclusion was vital if the book was to be written as part of an autobiographically-based trilogy. She put her position in an article in POLin 1969:

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 39 But with "Clean Straw" I've had a complete emotional block, and not all my deep and genuine sympathy at the sight of him struggling and fighting with what was obviously proving to be recalcitrant (sometimes I thought intractable) could force me into the old familiar step-sitting role. Nor all my professionalism could lure me into listening dispassionately. I do believe that novelists must be free to write wL. they like, in any way they like to write it (and after all who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?), but the stuff of which "Clean Straw For Nothing" is made is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and - as I said earlier - have felt differently because I am a different person. I was concerned that it was so hard for him, and grieved that I could not help. He had dreadful fits of depression and days of such incapacity that even half a page seemed an effort that drained him. And this from a man who could, once, churn out five thousand words a day without turning a hair and "never blot a line of it". Of course most of the novel - as with the text of "The Australians" - was written in hospital and he was pretty heavily drugged all the time so in a way it seems miraculous that he finished it at all. I suppose it's that quite inexorable steam-roller quality he has. And the fact that he'd been given a Commonwealh Literary Fellowship and felt morally obliged to produce the goods.

Time and again in Johnston's major work, the trilogy he set himself to write, fiction intersects with the real lives of people, raising questions about 'reality', 'accuracy', versions of 'the truth' and the accountability of art. In the final years of his life, even more than at other stages of his career as a writer, Johnston it seems had reached a plateau of detachment. He had pondered the nature of experience and of artistic expression, and as a person with a mission to fulfil in a finite time and against the odds of illness, he had trodden beyond the literal thinking of the non-artist. His attitude is to be found in tangential but telling statements about artistic endeavour and life. We are brief creatures, he seems to be saying, and might as well search for the truth behind the facts. Or it is as he viewed years earlier his life's virtual foreclosure, conveyed to him by a doctor in Athens - 'Anyway, I had to deal with it, and I thought to myself, it'll all be the same in a thousand years, or two or three. I can't walk or breathe properly, but at least I can make myself write properly.' Again, it clearly was a matter for Johnston of scaling difficult heights. 'When I think of all the words I've written,' he said in 1969, 'most of them you could put on a raft and float out to sea, and it wouldn't matter to anyone. Writing is hard work, a self­ inflicted wound .. .' And yet he persisted with his trilogy. We are left to conclude that life, as for Kenneth Siessor, was for Johnston a pilgrimage of enquiry and pleasure through pain, of which smoking, drinking, illness, personal anguish in his relationship with others and writing unto death each made a part. In his story, 'The Verdict', Johnston has David Meredith musing on his fate now that tuberculosis has been diagnosed, and thinking of his fragile love for Cressida, and concluding that it was 'just as untenable to imagine dying without Cressida as to imagine living without her - both things, of course, being essentially parts of the same adventure.' Great depths of experience and of purging through artistic endeavour and illness go, surely, to the use by Johnston of that word 'adventure'. So not surprising that he would have agreed with his painter friend Sidney Nolan, who, when asked in an interview in 1982 whether he thought Johnston should have used the hurtful details of Charmian's affairs on Hydra as a novelist's material in Clean Straw, replied: 'Oh, yes, there are no holds barred if it's purged into an art form: that justifies it.' By July 1969 Johnston was part-advanced with work on his third novel of the trilogy, A Cart load of Clay. On 9th July 1969, the day before the publication 40 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 of Clean Straw For Nothing, Charmian Clift committed suicide. Leaving a farewell note, she took an overdose of drugs. The Johnston family were desolated. For some time the pressures of writing, journalism, house-keeping and tending her husband, as well as her subsumed disquiet about the personal details of her life recorded fictionally in Clean Straw - a book she had never brought herself to read - had been bearing down on her and had led to her final depression and death. Johnston, left with his young family about him, reeled from the blow, but gradually settled into a new routine of survival. Despite pleas from his brother Jack and sister-in-law Pat to come to Melbourne where they could care for him, he knew that the conclusion of his work lay in Sydney. Had Charmian's death come before his starting on the final novel, he might never have been able to write its first words, but since it was in progress he fell back on Scott FitzGerald's dictum to cover his grief - 'Work, boy, work. It's therapy.' Clean Straw For Nothing, when it appeared, earlier in the year, carried in its title pages a note to readers, in the light of reactions to My Brother Jack, urging them not to try to give factual identity to its characters, since, although it was a novel pegged to a back-ground of actual autobiographical experience, it was nevertheless a very free rendering of the truth. The book again won for Johnston the Miles Franklin Literary Award. There was little celebration, just the sombre quiet of work continuing as Johnston told in his new novel of the land he had rediscovered as a returned expatriate, and of the advancing illness that had not allowed him to feel well for the last eleven years. He had worked out a regimen - work at the desk for three hours each morning, achieving an average of 1,000 words each day; lunch; a sleep in the afternoon; read the words written in the morning; a few beers; and then get dinner with his children. By now, like his character David Meredith in the novel he wrote, Johnston could only walk a few steps without pausing for breath and could not attempt the stairs in the Raglan Street house. But he still drove himself to set down the story, sometimes appearing sleepless in the morning after working right through the night. The evidence pointed to the fact that he should have been in hospital, but he clung to his home, adapting the opening he had written to the novel before Charmian's death so that her presence in the early pages is made to seem part of David Meredith's hallucinations. Rather than leaving the polishing of his work to a second draft stage as he had done with earlier novels, he now polished each day's work as he went - an insurance against his growing weakness. David Meredith's end, Johnston told his son Martin, was to come not directly from tuberculosis, but from a confrontation with some hooligans who beat him up when he attends a Hiroshima Day March in the streets of King's Cross. The anti-nuclear movement was a cause which George and Martin Johnston supported strongly. A Cartload of Clay also showed strongly the evidence of Johnston's interest in the techniques and exemplars of the modern novel. Again, during the writing of it, his son Martin recalls, Johnston delighted in pursuing reading and talking about the structure of the novel as writers had discovered it for themselves. He was excited to find a great deal written, not by critics (he was impatient with them) but by practising writers about their experience in making novels. Not surprising, then, that David Meredith, the writer struggling against his lack WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 41 of breath, his physical exhaustion in steamy Sydney, wants to celebrate the wisdom of Cavafy, Kafka, Camus and other story-tellers. Johnston found it increasingly difficult to look after his family as 1970 advanced. In May Jack and Pat Johnston came to Sydney from Melbourne but could not persuade Johnston to return to Melbourne with them. He unburdened himself to them in a long night-time talk about his past, but remained in Sydney where neighbours, and long-time friends like Ray and June Crooke assisted him, cooked for him after the departure of Martin and Shane. He kept writing. Then in July 1970 there were two days when the battle for breath kept him from his desk. Finally the breath of George Johnston failed to come. His incomplete novel, A Cart load of Clay, was published in the year following his death.

Photograph courtesy of Martin Johnston.

42 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 PETER LOFTUS

The Evening Star

The smooth breakers brought a mist which now and then lit the scene. The hardest of the gradual slopes had seen her trying to balance herself, but these were not in the least as overpowering as the sudden landless vista that seemed to pounce at her. She backed off, and held the edge of her scarf. The blue shallows seemed to reverberate. She grew calmer, when she realized she was in the company of some sea-birds, who squalled, and pecked at each other, and then ... gradually froze, as she moved forward. The same sense of gravity, she knew, was claiming them both. Although the waves, which looked so listless, she might have been here to create something from their muttering lips, had sometimes, she knew, come up with their thunderous breath, to make holes that couldn't have been bridged. She was aware of the blankness, and the staggering stillness, where the horizon was no more than the finest whisper ... from the furthest side of the earth. She wished, that here, she might have made her peace. The sense of indifference ... the majesty, of her natural surroundings, was a kind of balm, that she had no reason to fear. The solid rocks, in the distance, were even calmer. She held her hands at her sides, and nodded, as if some superior understanding was in this moment given to her. She could look, and see ... nothing ... only a vague shimmer, which seemed to be accentuated by a lifeless, rusty buoy, toppled over, as if it was some kind of plug. She picked her way along the shallows, and the birds scattered. She came to a point, where there was something ... She listened, as she heard the water rustling, but there was nothing ... no message ... She knew the solemnity ... the pauses, between each tidal rush ... were the claims of her own kind. They were solemn, indifferent, in a way, because they had nowhere to rest. She felt as though she could have been a small clam, or a mussel, balanced precariously between truth ... and the ideal spot to grow. She heard the soft, listless whispers, as the waves gradually fastened their grip, and she could follow their ... incantations, with a kind of breathless haste. The more she tried to understand ... she could see the buoy, making no movement at all, as if it was prepared to listen ... the more she understood that there was nowhere to make the lifelessness come to her, like some sort of visitor.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 43 She would have to maintain the same indifference, as if she was no more than a hidden breaker, waiting its turn to corne up, and lay itself obediently on the grey gravelly scarp. She was like some sort of masked figure, corne here, to hide herself. She listened, trying to make out if there was some kind of masterly inquiry going on. That would let her share, without any kind of supplication, in the balance between the horizontal frame she could see, far off, and the grey grooves which had risen up, like some sort of hallucination, warning her that she was taking a risk, that nothing could be guaranteed. She was full of a determined ... patience. That was why the birds, in a way, seemed to recognize her ... as one of their own, and stepped around her, and stood, as if trying to corne to terms with the way she was determined to cast a shadow. She saw, on the horizon, something ... misty. It was a snowy peak, and far behind it, there was the small track, winding ... She was now, without being aware of it, giving up to tears. They were glistening, faintly, and the hushed, reverberating accompaniment of the waves were making the softest possible counterpoint. The grey grooves had somehow laid bare a truth ... She knew, in her heart ... that she was insignificant. That nothing, even the warmth, that must have been here, at certain times of the day ... could have been deliberately poised, until she was allowed to take something back ... something, she could accept, without that continual shuddering ... at night, when she felt the distant tremors of her homeland. She was not even aware, in the end, that the birds were huddling, as they waited for the inevitability of darkness. She could see nothing ... not even the buoy, making a spectacular glow, as it reddened. She was like the ancient point, which seemed to resign itself, as the sun faded, and the deepening colour changes seemed to bind it, forever, like an outcast stepping with a morbid diligence from one station to the other. She banished herself, by making the peak dissolve. She stepped along the path, underneath the towering dunes, clutching at her scarf. There was sudden stillness. She held her hands out, longing ... to be given some explanation ... But the shallows went on, with their life, and their floodtides, behind her. The birds were silently preening themselves. She made a vow. This was enough. She had no need of the visions. She would hold herself, in that radiance, the same hope and trust with which she'd stepped down, from the gangplank, to find the first stranger's hand taking her, with a loose smile, into the grey overcast street, which was, in the end, as peaceful as her village, with its spire, its bowed heads gathered under the flamboyant colours of infinity.

44 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 ROSALEEN LOVE

The Sea-Serpent of Sandy Cape

"When I saw the sea-serpent", Miss Lovell wrote with strong black strokes, "I confess I was not prepared for it. The children saw it first. Jemima, and Jessie, and Robert, and they came running up the sandhill calling for me to come. I was admiring the stillness of the sea, and the beauty of the day." "What do you think?" Dr Ramsay asked his companion. "Fol-de-rol", McIntosh replied. "There's a consistency there, with other accounts ..." "Which is why these people see things in the first place." McIntosh was interested in the story, but not in the sea-serpent. "The platypus exists, though, and who'd have believed it?" "Nobody, and with reason." "My point precisely." "N ot my point." "There's the great deep out there, and hidden places, hidden forces ... " "And ondry land, there's human folly." McIntosh can't believe it's his rational friend who is speaking. "Read the letter again. It's a tall story, nothing more." Ramsay continued with Miss Lovell's story. "I went to the water's edge, and there I saw a huge animal, of a most pleasant and gentle demeanour. It lay quietly, its long neck rising from the water. The skin was glossy, and smooth as an egg, and shiny as silvery-grey satin. The head was snake-like, but the neck disappeared into a tough, velvety carapace, like a turtle's, ridged with a pattern of small grey squares. The other odd thing was its tail, which I saw only when it dipped its head under the water. It was long, forked at the end, and covered with scales as large as a thumbnail, scales of a rich chocolate brown, a colour so different from the rest of the animal, and the tail so distant from it, that at first I thought there were two quite distinct animals. We watched from the shore for fifteen minutes, and then the two halves of the creature moved as one, and in the time it took me to take one breath, the creature disappeared, and emerged again, just once, far out to sea where the steamers pass". "Not one, but two monsters! Nature is prodigal!" "It's consistent, with Poppopidian. The sea-serpent appears only when the water is flat. and the weather is clear."

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 45 Poppopidian compiled a record of sightings, back in 1820, when he wrote The Natural History ofNorway. Why do records of sea-serpents exist, if sea-serpents do not? "According to Poppodidian, Norway abounds in sea-monsters." "Norway abounds with people who say they've seen sea-monsters. It's not quite the same thing, Ramsay." "We must keep an open mind. If the sea-serpent of Sandy Cape exists, then the British Museum wants it, and they'll pay for it." That's the very best reason for keeping an open mind, and it keeps Ramsay reading. "Round here, the local name is Moha Moha. They say it has four feet, like an alligator, and can walk on land. The creature did not choose to reveal its feet to me, although I tried to see them through the water, so I make no claim about the feet, but Robert tells me he saw them, the Monday previous". "The testimony of children, and women ... " McIntosh is sceptical. Ramsay read on: "We, the undersigned, saw the Moha Moha making for the shore of Sandy Cape on June 8th, 1890.

James Alsbury, First Assistant, Sandy Cape Lighthouse William Lees, Third Assistant, Sandy Cape Lighthouse Mrs Lees Jemima Alsbury Jessie Alsbury Daughters of James Alsbury Robert (his mark) Rebecca Lovell, schoolmistress, Sandy Bay Lighthouse Community

"Where was the second lighthouse keeper, I'd like ~o know?" grumbled McIntosh. He was impressed in spite of himself. They ~nsidered it worth the trip from Brisbane up to Sandy Cape. For Ramsay, there could be a prize for biology, and as for McIntosh, he declared himself always available to record human folly in its many forms.

The mangrove swamp was a place of rare beauty, but Miss Lovell was the only one who saw it. Her mangrove sketches were singular, though whoever took delight in them must like mud, and black twisted roots, and seed-pods sproutipg, and pippis peeping half-in, half-out of the mud-flat. Her paintings were more traditional. Here's a delicate prawn, clear white, with pink translucent spots, a pen and wash affair and in the background the blue and green tentacles on the anenome in which the prawn resides, and lives protected and commensal with its host. Her ink drawings were not ... nice. That was the judgement of Mrs Lees. Though since the coming of the Moha Moha, Mrs Lees had a new respect for Miss Lovell and her biological interests. A new alliance has been forged. For Miss Lovell's report has brought many visitors to Sandy Cape, and Mrs Lees gave them teas, scones, and jam for sixpence.

46 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 "Tell me, Miss Lovell, about the habits of sea-serpents", said Mrs Lees, wiping her hands on her apron, and thinking of scones and jam. A knowledge of natural history had its uses. What is the definition of a sea-serpent? It is unmysterious. A sea-serpent is merely an elongate marine creature of an apparently unknown species, nothing more, Miss Lovell explained. "Like the monster in Loch Ness?" Mrs Lees must get back to her work, but she needed to sort out a few facts first. Miss Lovell set her straight. "The monster from Loch Ness is not a sea­ serpent. It is more properly a Lake Monster, and as such is not to be confused with our own Barrier Reef product." "It's truly a marvel", said Mrs Lees, and she went back to the lighthouse to count her money.

"Who is being hysterical? I'm not being hysterical", said Miss Lovell. She frowned at McIntosh when he ventured the suggestion. "Tell me one thing, Mr McIntosh, if sea-serpents do not exist, why have you travelled so far? To see something which isn't there?" She paid no attention when McIntosh explained his theory of perceptual contagion. "It's like this", he said. "First one person sees something, then another falls victim to suggestion, and then another, for there is by then the expectation created, the stage is set, and the image is already in the mind. The sea-serpent does not have to be out there, in the real world." Miss Lovell gave all her attention to Dr Ramsay. "I expect you will want to see the beach?" she asked, and she took the two men to the water. Dismissively, to McIntosh, she said, over a shoulder, "If I say I have seen a sea-serpent, Mr McIntosh, rest assured, it is the case." It was hot and sticky, and the air hummed with the sounds of insect life. Sandflies found difficulty in biting Miss Lovell, for she was swathed in clothes from neck to ankle. She was an observer of nature, not a participant in the ritual of predator and prey. The men were dressed as all naturalists should dress, when confronting the rigours of the Queensland climate. Each wore a sensible solar to pee, insulated at the top with a layer of air, thus guarding against the ever-present danger of sun-stroke and consequential brain-fever. Sensible jackets, of course, and high collars, a cravat each, long woollen trousers and button shoes. The insect life retired, defeated. The tide was out, Miss Lovell explained, and the shallow lagoon they saw before them was not there the day the sea-serpent came. Ramsay busied himself, with questions on length, and height, and weight, and colour, and speed of swimming, all that could be numbered, weighed, and measured. "Size, length, and weight, what does it matter?" McIntosh found the whole thing farcical. Ramsay and Miss Lovell talk earnestly about the tail. "Forked, you say?" asked Ramsay. "That would be atypical. Alligators don't have forked tails, nor do turtles." Miss Lovell was generous. "Perhaps the tail was paddle-shaped", she conceded. "With a large bite taken out of the middle. By some shark, or some

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 47 creature similar to itself. That's what Jemima said, when she saw it, and she's a sharp child." "I'll talk to her later", Ramsay promised. He was in his element, with sand, and sun, and water, and ajob to be done. On the beach, Ramsay came to the point. "The British Museum promises £100 for the complete animal, £50 for part, and a fair price for the head and neck, sun-dried." Miss Lovell sighed: "Demand for the Moha Moha is likely to exceed supply. I'll see what I can do, but you understand I cannot promise delivery." So up in the lighthouse, Billy Lees kept his eyes open for the Moha Moha. If you see a sea-serpent, catch it quickly, that's the point of this tale. Do not be taken in by its soulful eyes, or its gentle nature. It may have a peacable disposition, but that won't bring in £100, sun-dried. Miss Lovell imposed some more conditions on her visitors. "It is a sea-serpent of a gentle disposition. I don't want it cut up for soup." "Of course not", said Ramsay. "It will be cut up for science."

Ramsay was careful. One must keep an open mind, but it should not be a totally vacant one. Miss Lovell's testimony, he decided, could not be disregarded. She had seen something quite remarkable. For sea-serpent sightings, it is ordinary people on whom we must rely, people who are there, when the extra-ordinary happens, because they are going about their daily business. Miss Lovell will go out daily, and walk along the beach, for she finds thrill enough in the ordinary, in the sea-snake sloughing its gun-metal skin, or the heche de mer ejecting its intestines. She does not need the extra-ordinary for her purposes. That is why she may find it.

They lay in wait for the Moha Moha, but to tell the truth, nobody quite knew how to set about it. The lighthouse keepers had the advantage, but they couldn't spend all day looking out their octagonal windows. McIntosh didn't try very hard. He spent his time on the beach looking in the wrong direction, up the sandhill and over to the headland, observing the local birds out on Break-Sea Spit, and he did it on purpose. The children were always down on the beach, but they made inconsistent observers. Visitors came, and watched, and picnicked, and did not seem to worry much when after a day of waiting, nothing has happened. McIntosh found the human material for his study increasingly tedious. The people of Sandy Cape were so convinced of their rightness, and so resistant to his suggestions of delusion, that he was beginning to wonder if it wasn't a case of outright fraud. "They're all in it together," he told himself. For what? For the money? Tea and scones will hardly make Mrs Lees her fortune, though it served to make a dull life busy. Miss Lovell? She has her reputation to consider, as schoolmistress of Sandy Cape. In whose interests would deception be? "Perceptual contagion?" murmured McIntosh, but with increasing doubt. "Active collusion, more like it." He took himself off for afternoon tea with Mrs Lees. His life at Sandy Cape has settled into a routine.

48 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 One day they found a deep footprint, of an animal unknown at Sandy Cape. A curious footprint, for it was strange, really, to find just one, at the shore line, at dawn, with the tide advancing up the beach towards it. The black boy Robert found it, and he came running up to the lighthouse to wake the visitors. It worried Ramsay a little, he had to confess, when he came down, with calipers, and Plaster of Paris, and notebook in hand. A solitary footprint? Ramsay began to wonder whether perhaps his friend McIntosh might be right after all, that he was the victim of a practical joke. "Jemima, Jessie, tell me, have you ever heard the story of Robinson Crusoe?" he asked them casually, when he could get them away from the others. Jemima and Jessie chatter and giggle, and look at the footprint, and look away again, and say, yes, they know the story. "I thought you might," said Ramsay grimly. The children seem so wide-eyed and innocent, they must be guilty. Ramsay took the measurements, and prepared the Plaster of Paris, but the joy had suddenly gone out of his work. Faking a footprint, that'd be quite an easy thing to do. Especially one which will soon disappear with the tide. Ramsay was an expert on fossil fish, not on saurian footprints. Anyone could do it. There was Robert, he'd have some clues about the limits of the possible. It was Robert who told them the local stories of the Moha Moha in the first place. Robert wouldn't know of Robinson Crusoe, but someone else could have put him up to it. Miss Lovell? He couldn't believe it. James Alsbury, pillar of light­ house keeper rectitude and puritan morality? Again, it strained the imagination. Of course, thought Ramsay, the person we least suspect is the one who's likely to be the most to blame, when the story comes out in the end. The more he examined the people around him, the more they all looked far too innocent. It could turn out to be, in the end, a case of collusion against him, against science and morality. The more Ramsay tried to analyse the footprint, the less convincing it seemed. Round him the residents of Sandy Cape buzzed like sand-flies. They chattered about the position of the animal, and its posture. It was heading in the direction ofthe water, they decided. Hardly surprising, thought Ramsay. The toes pointed towards the sea. And where were the other footprints? Why just one? Ramsay caught the eye of McIntosh, and was troubled. Miss Lovell displayed the depth of the indentation, and the shape of the toes. Toes? Talons? Claws? There was an element of each. All it needed to see them was a little imagination, as all theory and its relation to practice must require. Ramsay asked McIntosh his opinion, though he thought he knew it already. "More collusion," replied McIntosh. But who is fooling who? McIntosh knew he knew some of the answers, for he had faked the footprint. Rather clever that, he's proud of his capacity to present so much excitement to the Sandy Cape community. All it took was an afternoon, a horse shoe, some Plaster of Paris, and his own undoubted skills in sculpture. He's been leaving fake footprints around for a week, but nobody's noticed till now. McIntosh wants his forgery to flush the real villians. He thinks that the discovery of a second fraud will tell those who perpetrated the first fraud that someone was onto them. If the first announcement was a fraud, that is.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 49 He could be wrong, of course, for as the days went by, the footprint only seemed to him to be confirming the residents of Sandy Cape in their delusions. More and more, McIntosh decided at last, he must return to his notion of perceptual contagion. These people are not in active collusion. They have all deceived themselves. That he has come to this conclusions by means of deception does not worry him at all. In the search after truth, the ends must justify the means.

The people of Sandy Cape are in a state of perceptual readiness. They want to see the sea-serpent.

"It never existed in the first place. It was a figment of the imagination," said McIntosh. He was going home. He'd talked to everyone, and had his theory safe and sound. They were all deluded, and he was the only person at Sandy Cape with true clarity of vision. "A true case of perceptual contagion," he'll call it, and he'll write it up for the medical journals. When McIntosh said "Sea-serpents do not exist", he was surely helping to create the conditions under which sea-serpents will not exist. For if we go around saying that the sea-serpent is a mythical beast, then people will not tell when they think they have seen one. They will be scared of being thought deluded, or drunk, or both. They spent one last night on the beach, observing. Down they went with hurricane lamps, and rugs, and scones and jam, prepared to make a scientific event or a social occasion of it. McIntosh brought his folding telescope, and his stand, and set it up to look at the stars: anything but the sea. Ramsay had his tape-measure, and his calipers, and his optimism. Ramsay and Miss Lovell spent some time discussing the naming of the sea­ serpent. Moha Moha will not do, they decided, for though it was euphonious, it had the ring of the arbitrary about it. "It's half saurian, half turtle. Chelosaurus, will that do? Chelosaurus Lovelli?" Miss Lovell is gratified, though she thought some credit should go to the boy Robert. Ramsay disagreed. True scientific credit should go, not to the first observer, but to the first person who thought the observation significant enough to report it. "Mere observation, without record, is not enough." If the observation is proved false? Then the record will be an error, with Miss Lovell's name attached as proof of folly. The night drifted on, and talk died down. The hurricane lamps were running low, and at last there was talk of heading for home. The residents of Sandy Cape make their way up the sandhill, and Ramsay and McIntosh start to pack up the folding telescope. Their last chance before they leave, and nothing has happened. There are stirrings in the deep. There often are. It's like creaking floorboards in an empty house. The deep is full of activity, and the forces of life and death do not cease when the sun goes down. Miss Lovell pauses on the track at the top of the headland, and looks back at the men below. She calls out, for what is that down there? A shape, a large shape down by the edge of the water, a snake like shadow of a long creature, rearing out of the water?

50 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 Miss Lovell cries, and her companions run to see what is happening. They strain into the darkness. They see shadows, and shapes, and stirrings, but each will report something different to the others, when it is over. Down on the beach, Ramsay runs to look. He trips over and the lamp goes out. He has sand in his eyes, and he cannot see. He cries out for help, and McIntosh stumbles though the darkness. Then McIntosh too, cries out, for he has been thumped on the back, and sent sprawling on top of his friend. There is total confusion on the beach. Lighthouse keepers, children, Miss Lovell, and the two men of science, and perhaps a Moha Moha, all run around in noise and the excitement of the moment.

McIntosh argues that he has been thumped by an illusion. de considers he has established that perceptual contagion is catching.

The years go by, and the Moha Moha isn't seen, at least by Miss Lovell. She lives in hope, and daily she walks along the shore. It was probably only a long-necked chelonian after all, she thinks, but for a while it promised great things, and if it promised more than it provided in the end, she was not particularly unhappy.

Too much belief? Or not enough? It depends, on whether you've been the one to report the sea-serpent, or whether you're the one who only reads about it.

INPRINT

The final issue of INPRINT concerns Western Australian short stories. The issue includes stories by Peter Cowan, T.A.G. Hungerford, Elizabeth Jolley, Fay Zwicky and others. $ 5 from P.O. Box 666, Broadway, N.S.W., 2007.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 51 M.E. PATTI WALKER

A Taxidriver's Liturgy

I plant trees in my garden. They help preserve the ancient cult of tree worship. Big trees give me a sense of proportion, I'm thinking, travelling along a thorny stretch near the crown of the hill Some roads dip before ascending, others twist Some are rough as gutz, some are diversions Like people, roads run the gamut of emotions Interrupting my thoughts, my fare recalls an event then diverts our attention. "See the waratah!" forgets what she was saying. Now we're crossing the Roseville Bridge. Tall eucalypts chancel choir angels king-size cottonwoods and spiralling pines

Madam Fangio

You're a lily on a dirtbox, the lady driver day dreams till hooted by another driver. "Up you too Caligula!" she screams, thrusting her fist from the window jerking her middle finger skywards, shouting "Bluebeard!" to the man belting his horse along the bitumen. Later at Riverwood she hits a possum.

At the crown of a steep descent a concrete mixer sits in her rear vision mirror. Switching lanes, she forces herself into a cacophony of horns. Jammed in thick traffic a motorcyclist slams her backside.

52 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 At Kingsgrove she selects ginger beer, changes it for apple juice. The shopkeeper laughs, "A woman's prerogative." She's at Picnic Point when the operator inquires "Enjoying yourself Madam Fangio? You've got a long drive home."

Reducing speed slowly, she moves left of a chain of vehicles static at the stop lights. She inches forward Now! Putting her boot in it she flies by Superman. Don Juan flings his arm at forty-five degrees. A fare for Forestville. "You don't mind the night shift?" he smiles engagingly. She's burning up the highway zapping taxis on a rank, like chassis in a bodyworks.

When setting Don Juan down, he says "Y ou 're the sweetest smelling taxidriver 1 have had" kisses her hand and pleads to kiss her lips. When alighting he cries, "Wait, 1 want to kiss your other cheek." . The ladydriver whoops, "I can handle this affair."

A mini noses its bonnet into the speedway, hesitates lets the Pilgrim Mother go. Threatened by a truckie, the ladydriver pushes on in top. Two A. M. in silent streets, the only movement a computerised clock in a pharmacy showcase and Madam Fangio, driving the other drivers home.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 53 LAURIS EDMOND

Tempo

In the first month I think it's a drop in a spider web's necklace of dew

at the second a hazel nut; after, a slim Black-eyed Susan demurely folded asleep on a cloudy day

then a bush-baby silent as sap in a jacaranda tree, but blinking with mischief

at five months it's an almost-caught flounder flapping back to the glorious water

six, it's a song with a chorus of basses: seven, five grapefruit in a mesh bag that bounces on the hip on a hot morning down at the shops

a water melon then, surely - green oval of pink flesh and black seeds, ripe waiting to be split by the knife

nine months it goes faster, it's a bicycle pedalling for life over paddocks of sun no, a money-box filled with silver half-crowns a sunflower following the clock with its wide-open grin a storm in the mountains, spinning rocks

54 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 down to the beech trees three hundred feet below - old outrageous Queen Bess's best dress starched ruff and opulent tent of a skirt packed with ruffles and lace no no, I've remembered, it's a map of intricate distinctions

purples for high ground burnt umber for foothills green for the plains and the staggering blue of the ocean beyond waiting and waiting and aching with waiting

no more alternatives! Suddenly now you can see my small bag of eternity pattern of power my ace my adventure my sweet-smelling atom my planet, my grain of miraculous dust my green leaf, my feather my lily my lark look at her, angels - this is my daughter.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 55 SHANE McCAULEY

The Beast

Saying it is a sword, a torch, A standard, the child holds up a stick, Waves it. The others believe.

Such was The Master Therion, Distraught by ordinariness, Wishing, oh wishing so hard, that Dark voices would erupt In his head, that all who met him Would stay, enchanted. Some did, Though few had the sweet derangement To abide by his motto, 'Perdurabo'. Only The Tree of Life let him down. Hope is not a dove, but a blind fish Deep in a desert cave.

So, putative originator of a magic Almost commonplace, proclaimed Head of the Ordo Templi Orientis, He avoided everything tragic, found Life explained fully in cards, in Stars, in the razor smoothness of cocaine.

Notorious merely to the gullible, He waged war on the light, yet Delighted in Sicily, finally found In death a tarot neatly accurate. Magic at last seemed simply his Life heightened. He packed up the Tricks, and was buried in Brighton.

56 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 DA VE METZENTHEN

A Birthday Present For Briony

The little red Alpha curly-cued into the car space. Pete killed the motor and sat, fingers tapping on the steering wheel, eye-brows beetling, thinking. Now what the hell does she want? Or need?

He ran a smooth, spidery hand along his jawbone and for a moment stared directly ahead, looking at nothing. Think. Think! Then, like a deckhand thrashing a winch, he wound up the car window. That done, he glanced over his shoulder into the oncoming traffic and prepared to get out. Cars, on the prowl for a Saturday morning park nosed up behind. Going? Fish-mouthed through glass. Staying! Head-shake from Pete. He sat poised, door ajar, arm tensed, sandshoe hovering, then out! Onto the footpath and walking, collar up, shades down, fists whacked into jacket pockets, amongst the pre-occupied masses. Aha! The human salmon migrate! Pete grinned at the thought as he strode up the street, his tall, wobbling, window-to-window reflection bounding along beside him. O.K., he decided, let's get serious. So what does my little darling want, eh? Pearls? Perhaps. A decorator print? Or clothes or sheets or none of the above? He snapped his fingers and sucked in a breath through clenched teeth. Well, what does she like then? Sailing. So she does. Well, what about those yellow gumboot things and a matching hat? She'd laugh, love them! Would she? Maybe ... not! Pete launched himself forward. Lookout! Man armed with potplants! Step aside or bear a fruit! What about a plant? She loves plants! She does not. Flowers she loves, plants she likes. Right. Next. Well, what would make her laugh?

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 57 A Rolls Royce. Make it a Leah Jet! Make that a left turn. Bump! Sorry madam! Just trying to get a look at those prints there. Beautiful? Yes they are. But right they are not! Sidestep a busker. Sorry sport, no time to listen but I love your shirt and don't the human salmon look happy today? Fit even. Fit! She loves tennis! She just bought a racquet. A set of weights? Weights! What? Get off the grass! It was just a .. . Suggestion .. . Hey, jewellery! Does she need it? Does anyone? Well, look at least. Diamonds. Out of character? Out of pocket! Out of mind. Right. Well, something amusing. What then? A game. Trivial-what's-its-name. Pursuit. That. She's got a shocking memory! Prefers Snakes and Ladders. Or Snap. So? So, no dice. Whoops, watch it girls! Ahhh! Sweet sixteen and cigarettes all round. They laughed. They would. Speaking of cigarettes, a lighter? Flat one, thin one, classy one. Classy? Arsey! She's trying to stop. Umm, French champagne and perfume? Who are you trying to kid? Some people like those things! And some people should not take their pooches shopping! Yes, you sir, shift the dog! I don't care if its a three hundred dollar Weimeraner I'll kick it anyway. So I patted it instead? I like mutts. Hey, what about a pet? Pet what? Rock, dog, parrot, fish? They die. They do. Tally Ho then.

58 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 Ah! Oh! Madam, your Vogue magazine trespasses directly across my face! Shut. Thankyou and good luck with the re-decorating! Now where was I? A book shop. Worthwhile? Worth a look. The little brass bell rings a little. Droll. Shhh! Intelligent people don't like loud noises. Well, start where? One of those big ones. An Art book. Yeah! She loves it! Leonardo? Michaelangelo! See her curled up on the couch, Sunday, footy socks, golden locks, immersed, engrossed, enthralled! Or one of these. Travel, Africa. Great photographs! Beautiful people! Pity we can't go. Here darling, the tickets, oh how nice. What's this? Black and white photographs. Beirut. Beirut? Wrong. Put it back. No, I'll have a look at it while I'm here. Broaden the horizons, expand the mind, look and learn, whatever. Sticky pages. Smells new. Big solid book this one. Two hands for beginners. Open her up. Christ. Christ! Look at this! No thanks. Go on, read it! All right. It says, · . , Insane Child Tied To Bed During Bombing. You're joking? I'm not. That's what it says ... , Insane Child Tied To Bed During Bombing. The kid is only four years old! Roped round the wrists to an iron bed. What sort of a book is this? Pictures. Picture book. Well, the pictures had better get better. · .. Spreading Lime Over Victims In A Mass Grave. They get worse. Blood, black on white shirts; twisted legs, broken arms, smashed heads. The lime looks like snow. Flick the page! No. Flick it! O.K., it's flicked. · .. A Boy Who Had Picked UP A Booby-Trapped ... Jesus! A kid cut to bits. Ripped, torn, slashed. Head injuries. Turn over. No.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 59. You should. I shouldn't have. Look at this. · .. About To Execute ... About to! These three people are going to die. Future tense. Their eyes are dead already, given up, surrendered, captured, murdered. Shot in the back of the head beside a proxy brick wall. Enough? More than. · .. Palestinian Citizens Appealing For Mercy ... The Same Man Lies Dead ... The Man On The Left Is About To Die. And there he is - dead - as a door nail, in his own private pool of blood. Next. What could be? This. · .. Young Christians, One With a Mandolin, Serenade The Death Of A Young Palestinian Girl ... She's shot. Face down in the mud. You can't breathe mud. Fact of life. She doesn't breathe. Got a little duffle coat on, dirty on the front, clean on the back. Seven, nine, eleven? Next. · .. Girl Throwing Hand Grenade ... Next. · .. Man Burnt By Phosphorous Shell ... Next. · .. Men Selected For Death ... Next. · .. Bodies That Have Been Set On Fire ... Next. · .. Struck In The Face By A Bullet ... Next · .. Pleading Prior To Execution ... My God, this book! These pictures. Shut it then. Yeah, shut the book. Don't. Buy it. Buy it? For whom? You know. Briony!? Briony. I won't! You could. I couldn't! For you then. Me? You. No!

60 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 You won't? I will not. You should. Perhaps. I'm not! It's shut! On the shelf. Beirut. Gone.

Christ, the parking meter! Expired. Run.

DIVERSITY ITSELF Essays in Australian Arts and Culture Edited by Peter Quartermaine

Exeter Studies in American and Commonwealth Arts No. I General Editor: Richard Maltby Contributors: Delys Bird, David Bromfield, Bruce Clunies Ross, Ian Craven, Fay Gale, Don Grant, Sneja Gunew, Jane Jacobs, Peter Quartermaine, Henry Reynolds, Werner Senn, Sam Smiles, Graeme Turner. Contemporary Australia enjoys a rich and varied culture, though abroad the nation is often perceived in terms of misleading stereotypes. In this collection scholars from Britain, Denmark, Switzerland and Australia itself explore redefinitions of Aboriginal history, modern painting, Australian cinema, poetry and fiction, women's writing, migrant cultures and the impact of tourism upon aspects of Aboriginal heritage. Their arguments demonstrate the relevance of insights drawn from Australian material to countries and cultures elsewhere in the world. Drawing upon twenty years' teaching and research experience, the editor contributes a probing keynote introduction on the implications for British society and education today of Commonwealth cultural aspirations and of the distorting legacies of imperialism. Paperback, AS, 192 pages, 7 plates, £7.95 net. ISB~ 0 85989 282 4 Publication date: 15 October 1986 The Publications Office, University of Exeter, Reed Hall, Streatham Drive, Exeter EX4 4QR (0392) 263066 EXETER UNIVERSITY PUBLICATIONS

WESTERLY, No.1, MARCH, 1987 61 ADRIANA ELLIS

Us and Them

Lainie and I were good friends for years. We first met when we were both working in a boutique in the city. She used to do all sorts of mad things to liven the place up. It was a dead little shop. All the local office girls would finger through the racks and you'd say, can I help you? and they'd hardly ever look at you. Some of them didn't even answer. Lainie would climb into the window when Mrs Johns was out. She would stand very still, like one of the dolls. Some people would stop, look again, then smile. But most of them didn't even notice. I used to crack up. Her funniest trick was just before Christmas. About Christmastime shoppers get into a bit of a frenzy. Women would dive into the shop, throw clothes about, buy things, forget what they'd bought, they'd go mad. The shop would be turned upside down by Friday. Mrs Johns had gone out to do some shopping of her own. Lainie was on top of the racks doing a sort of tapdance when she got back. So that was the end of Lainie and me working together there. I didn't last much longer, it was so boring after Lainie left. My next job was in a little shopping plaza. That was a short stint. My boss blamed one of his mistakes on me. We both knew he'd done it himself so I quit. I hate liars. Lainie and I used to talk a lot about independence then. We were both into being self-sufficient. She was living with Mike, I think she got a lot of her ideas from him. 'It's us and them, mate,' she used to say. We started selling tomatoes together at a market. Mike had heard of someone who made a killing selling tomatoes. The big drawback was Lainie couldn't get up. She found it hard to get out of bed before eight or even eight-thirty. She bought two alarm clocks, one Russian, one American. 'It's like war at five forty-five in the morning,' Mike complained. We were always late for the markets. By the time we got there, there was only red mush left. Nobody wanted it. 'Cooking tomatoes,' we'd call out. 'Lovely red cooking tomatoes.' Once we even tried to give them away. They wouldn't take them for free. After that we quit. The next markets was quite different.

62 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 'I run a shipshape operation,' the Manager growled. 'You either shape up or you ship out.' He used to be in the navy. You had to be there on time and he wanted you to look neat and tidy. 'This is just like a job,' Lainie said. 'Capitalist pig,' she'd mutter as he walked past. We were selling small wooden animals from Asia. 'Exploiting the Asian labour market,' Mike said, perching on the end of the stall. 'Get off the trestle,' Lainie snapped. 'It'll fall over. You know yourself that we personally are not exploiting anyone, we're working on very narrow margins.' Which was true. 'A non-essential item,' Mike said. 'Australian consumers are already overloaded with non-essentials. Now food, there's a decent sort of living. Provide people with food. ' 'N 0 more tomatoes,' Lainie said. He was right about them being overloaded, no one wanted to by our animals. 'Food, clothing, housing, that's what you've got to get into,' Mike said. 1 went back to the clothing. 1 got a job in a fairly decent boutique, good wages. 1 missed the freedom of not wearing makeup and putting on what 1 liked but it was nice to have money to spend for a change. Lainie went on the dole. Mike started getting enthusiastic about leaving the Public Service and getting into the food line. 'Y ou called us capitalists,' 1 accused him. 'Food is a decent way to make a living,' he said. 'You're giving the people what they need. And we won't be ripping them off like everybody else.' 1 looked at Lainie. 'I could get into that,' she said. 'I'm tired of working for the man. There's no freedom in that.' 'Y ou can come in too,' Mike said to me. 'I'll wait and see,' 1 said. They were my best friends, but he was talking about thousands of dollars. Mike had quite a bit of money in the bank. All those years in the Public Service. He started looking at lunch bars. 'I want to give the workers decent Aussie food,' he said. 'Pies, pasties, sausage rolls, sandwiches. That sort of thing. And then we'll have a couple of vego alternatives. And fruit juices and cool drinks.' 'What about ciggies?' 1 asked. N one of us smoked tobacco. 'No cigarettes,' he said. 'Bad for your health.' 'So are bloody meat pies,' Lainie said. 'The link between meat pies and ill health has not been proven,' Mike said. 'You know that's the sort of thing the tobacco industry say,' 1 said. 'The tobacco industry is a different thing altogether,' Mike retorted. The government doesn't want to lose it's tax base, that's why they've never allowed Public Health departments to condemn the industry. Everybody knows -' Mike has a habit of lecturing. He should have been a teacher.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 63 They kept on looking. I was busy with a new boyfriend. Bomber Mackay. He never told me where he got his nickname from. I never found out his real name either. He never told anybody anything he didn't want to, it didn't matter how close they were. He told me one day his dad used to belt him with a dog collar but he still wouldn't talk. I forgot to ask him if it was the sort with studs or just a plain one. Mike finally found the place they were looking for. A small shop, closed up. The previous owners had run out of money. It was really dirty too. But the rent was cheap and it wasn't far from where they lived. 'It's not a good omen, that they went bust,' I said, fingering the dirty counter. 'So could we.' 'No, no,' Mike said. 'New blood, new ideas. Offer the world what it wants and it'll corne knocking on your door. They'll know they're getting a good deal from us.' 'A lot of work,' Lainie said doubtfully. 'But it's cheap,' Mike said. His enthusiasm won us over. We started cleaning up, then painting the place. Mike and Lainie signed a two year lease with an option. Mike and I gave our notices in. We drank a toast that night. 'To the future,' Mike said. 'And bugger the past,' Bomber added. We opened the second weekend in March. 'Beware the Ides,' Bomber said. 'What are you on about?' I said. I liked being with him but he could be very negative sometimes. I think he wanted to be mysterious. We were gonna have a party on our first weekend but the takings were too low, we couldn't afford it. Not even enough to cover Mike and Lainie's rent. We had talked about money and Mike was going to pay me the award rate for lunch workers, whatever that was, but I couldn't take a wage when they weren't. 'We're all in it together,' I said. 'It'll pick up, this is just the beginning.' Even Mike looked a bit down. He got a cigarette machine in. 'Every bit counts,' he said. Lainie and I did the dogwork, spreading the sandwiches and so on. Mike did the managing. Lainie was different to work with this time. There were no jokes, no madness. She was very serious about it all. She would smile politely to the customers, yessir and nosir them. It was very strange, as if she had changed overnight. All the years I'd known her, that Lainie had melted away. I tried to crack a few jokes now and then but she didn't laugh much. There were a couple of people in the shop one day when I knocked the mayonnaise over. She snapped at me then and I felt an idiot. Afterwards I realised she'd spoken to me just like a boss to a worker. 'You're a mug,' Bomber said. They're just like you and me,' I said. They're not after money so much, just self-sufficiency. And Mike's a perfectionist, he wants everything to go well. They're worried about the money going down the drain. It's the pressure.' 'When's he going to start paying you?' 'Y ou know the situation Bomber.'

64 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 'Anybody setting up in business, they gotta allow for worker's wages, otherwise there's no business.' 'They're my friends,' I said huffily. I stopped the jokes in the shop, just got on with the work. The trouble was, Lainie would say to do one thing, Mike would say to something else. We didn't do things together on the weekend any more, I suppose we saw enough of each other. The takings of the shop went up so we all got a wage, but Mike didn't tell me how much they were getting. Just that I was getting more than them, but he couldn't afford the award rates. The takings sounded a lot but as he said there were a lot of expenses. The lunch hour was the busy time and he put on a part-timer, Marie. Marie and I got along well. Tuesday, Wednesday weren't so busy so Lainie took a bit of time off then. She went out shopping and so on. 'She's not a bad boss,' Marie said. 'You find her alright to work for, don't you?' 'Yes,' I said uneasily. She didn't seem to realise that Lainie was my friend. Lainie came back wearing a nice new dress. 'It's lovely,' Marie gushed. 'I went to see old Mrs Johns, now that I'm a business woman myself, and I just happened to see this, so I splurged.' 'Very nice,' I muttered. 'Remember the time she fired me.' Lainie asked. 'Yes,' I said, stepping back and knocking the broom over. 'God you're clumsy,' Lainie said. Marie giggled. I'm sick and tired of hearing about those two,' Bomber said as we lay back in bed on a Sunday morning. 'You work like a dog for your so-called friends,' I turned over and cried into the pillow. 'There, there,' Bomber said, patting me. 'Don't worry about it. Forget it.' 'I don't know what happened,' I said. 'That's life,' Bomber shrugged. 'You gotta look out for number one.' 'It used to be us and them, what changed it all?' 'It's every man for himself nowadays.' Bomber put his arm around me. 'But don't worry, I'm still your friend.' After brekky we went for a swim down the beach. The sand was hot on my bare feet. 'This'll do,' I said to Bomber at the first bit of space. We dumped the towels and began the usual sprint to the water. I beat the shit out of him for a change and he had to buy the drinks.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 65 PHILIP HODGINS

The Haystack

It wasn't just a pile of bales. It was a home for baby possums, dreamy kittens, disappearing snakes and pertinacious Willie wagtails. I used to build a row of battlements along the top and look out from the castle's vantage point. The view was flat green symmetry with barbed wire seams, and if the cows were near the sound of all those mouths rhythmically tearing the grass would come clearly up. We had a dog who more than once came back from there with bloody rips across his face and something dead and furry in his mouth. But only once I found him dead up there. One long hot afternoon I left my mother in the kitchen baking bread and went outside to see a massive loaf sun-crusted and fresh inside. Later on it became a testing place for cigarettes and alcohol and then when I no longer had to hide those things I had to learn the way the stack was made. That took a while. My first attempt collapsed within a few days of the event but what we found could just as well have been there for a thousand years.

66 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 The bay was open like a quarry and a company of rough stone blocks that would have made a temple for the king was left abandoned on the ground. It seemed the empire had collapsed. One season after that the stack burnt down. It went up at sunset. The first we knew of it was when the neighbours drove around en masse as if they had been waiting for a signal. The sun went down obscured by smoke and in the morning everything was black. We never should have pressed those bales so green. In the following phoenix weeks I was impressed by how insurance money and contract lucerne could resurrect a stack so quickly. The smoke had hardly cleared before we saw again the pristine mass of one of Proust's metonymic cathedrals. When I think how many times the haystack's meaning changed I also think how much its purpose stayed the same. There must have been a moral there for love and hungry cows because no matter what the weather we were always giving it away.

WESTERL Y, No. I, MARCH, 1987 67 SHANE McCAULEY

The Tower

We guess at past perfection from sifting Ruins, stride out distances, point to where Ramparts stood, granaries, shrines, shelters - All now in the mind; significances are lost To us so we create new ones: here is Sign of war, here fire ravaged, here earthquake, Here, even, are forms captured in lava, mud, As we are trapped in air, moving and frozen Gestures curiously similar. But perfection Through annihilation? We would still build Dream palaces on fragments, fixedly believing In our own permanence, saying 'We are Still in Eden, nor is our expulsion complete.' While admiring, we condescend to those Who have gone before, marvel at primitive Inventiveness, the varieties of destruction, Desecration, forgetting that oceans, Deserts, winds, comets, the fracturing Of lightning, perpetually encroach, Pretending so seriously to have harnessed Nature, as if tides could stop their lunar Striving, flowers not duplicate themselves. So collective folly is dignified in history's N arne, each successive rampant ape given Glorious title: as if stone towers climbing Higher did not mean so much further For the spirit to fall.

68 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 PETER PORTER

Working with Arthur Boyd

Many creative people (if we can redeem that phrase from its media and advertising taint) have a hunger, a nostalgia even, for the enormous pleasures of working with their peers and contemporaries. Somewhere at the back of our unclarified minds we have a vision of Florentine painters at work side by side on scaffolds, of Mozart pressing Da Ponte for the next few pages of the libretto of Don Giovanni, or Richard Strauss setting the stage directions in Rosenkavalier in his excitement at receiving the words, of Diaghilev ringing up and suggesting that someone join his team of crack collaborators. Today, according to Ken Tynan, the only true joint effort possible is in the cinema. Each film is a product of many different abilities, not even the director's often tyrannical control entitling him to call himself its sole creator. The modern poet, painter, novelist composer, is cocooned in his ego and isolated from both the world of his fellow-artists and that of his public by his inheritance of Nineteenth Century individualism. The rewards can be great, especially in America - money and fame on a scale hardly experienced since the time of such princely performers as Rubens and El Greco. Not for us the anonymity of the men who built Chartres Cathedral. But again we must look to America for the price which may have to be paid - alcoholism, divorce,jumping from bridges, despair when fashion changes etc. My own experience has been that the most usual price paid for attempted collaboration and its heaven-scaling possibilities has been disappointment. I do not intend this as a slight on my collaborating artists and friends, but only as an indication of the great complexity involved in collaborative art. I have always said that I like being commissioned and welcome the notion of being asked to work to a theme, a text or a set of public requirements. In practice, I have seldom brought off such a commission: either what I've produced has been mediocre or I have failed to find anything to say at all. Bending one's recalcitrant invention to someone else's need is not just frustrating, it is nearly impossible. Only when I first began to work with Arthur Boyd did I find that there is a fulfilling way of collaborating, and that it requires each artist to go his own way, the resultant works being counterpointed rather than harmonised. Stravinsky asserted that he liked working to commission, but added that the artist should make sure that he was commissioned to carry out

WESTERLY, :-.io. I, MARCH, 1987 69 what he had already decided he wanted to do. My experience with Boyd has been at the opposite end of patronage - I have been given the subject, but allowed to develop it as I saw fit, being simply plonked down on a wide-ranging theme and told to write poems to it. Arthur would then do the pict::~~s in whatever form he fancied and the end-product would be the two sets of art­ works issued together in a book. My description of this process, of course, begs many questions, including that of how much value the final book might have, but it underlines the autonomy of imagination which I believe to be essential to any worthwhile collaboration. I was late in learning to appreciate painting. But from the very start I loved music and entertained specific ambitions to help create it. Not having any talent for performing or composing, I saw that I should have to provide words for composers if I were to add anything to the world of music beyond listening to it. So before I'd published a single poem in a magazine, let alone issued a book, I had begun writing words for composers who were aspirants like myself. In more than thirty years I must have written hundreds of pages of poetry and prose specifically for music, and most of it has been wasted effort, or nearly so. Sometimes, of course, one can salvage poetry intended for musical performance and print it purely as verse. My early poem, "Annotations of Auschwitz" was written originally as a cantata text for David Lumsdaine, but was published separately several years before the score was finished. All the way through my Collected Poems there are pieces which I have saved from the wreck of various musical projects. The roll-call of compositions with my words is quite long: I have collaborated with Don Banks, Christopher Whelen, Nicholas Maw, George Newson, Ronald Senator and Geoffrey Burgon, as well as with David Lumsdaine. Yet, for everyone work which has been brought happily to fruition, many others have died on the page or at the composer's desk. I now believe that the happiest collaboration between poet and composer comes about when the composer chooses an already written text and sets it to music. The provision of poems specifically for music is far more fraught with problems. Many of the greatest musical masterpieces. have words by competent hacks, and it is one of the peculiarities of music that Bach could set doggerel by Picander with the same power and assurance he brought to passages from the Gospels. Working with Arthur Boyd has been analogous to my happier experience with musical setting - i.e. when the already existing· poem has found a sympathetic note in a composer's imagination. A vital further consideration is the one mentioned earlier, that the subject has been agreed by us both from the beginning. It may be a delusion but I feel that this collaboration, which has spanned the period between 1971 and the present, has gained by my steadily increased interest in painting as an art. I haunt London's National Gallery, and whenever abroad try to see as many pictures as possible, especially in the galleries and churches of Italy. The National Gallery has the best and most balanced representation of Italian painting of any great collection in the world. It also reflects the English affection for Poussin and Claude, a fondness I share. It formed a sort of water table of vision for me in writing poems to go with pictures. It is also interesting that, widely divergent though the styles and iconography of painting over such an extended period must be, the sense of

70 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 mechanical invention (perspective, geometric shapes, numerology, proportion) serving human concerns, and the balance between figure painting and landscape being so naturally preserved, is opposed to many of the canons of twentieth century art in a way that Boyd's procedures also are. 1 would not want to claim Boyd as someone who rejected Modernism, but 1 would want to stress how readily he creates both images (human and animal) and landscapes. The figure in landscape is probably at the centre of Western European art, and Boyd, particularly among Australian painters, has found ways of extending this tradition to the new land and its different light which are remarkably stable achievements, and not just pioneering concepts. Arthur Boyd and 1 both enjoy working to a theme, producing what amounts to a whole suite of poems and images which circle some myth or verbal icon. Our Maecenas has been the English publisher and critic, T.G. Rosenthal. Tom Rosenthal brought us together first in the early days of the Seventies, though 1 had met Arthur before this at the Royal Court Theatre and other places in the Sixties. Boyd had already done several series of pictures to Biblical and Religious themes (Nebuchadnezzar, Francis of Assisi among others), as well as his Aboriginal Bride sequence. Rosenthal asked us to consider the Old Testament and find a subject there for poems and pictures. He suggested the Book of Job, but 1 was daunted by the prospect of following in the steps of William Blake. I thought of some aspects of the Gospels and The Acts of the Apostles but Tom was not keen - "Let's keep this Jewish", he said. I had always been fascinated by the brief Book of Jonah, which falls so neatly into two parts of two chapters each - the Whale and Nineveh. So I simply divided each part into ten sections, touching at salient points the story, and made plans for poems at each point. In practice, the poems multiplied and I ended up with about thirty­ five, eventually reducing this number to the fifteen in each part which appear in the published volume. Anyone who has read Jonah will see that its prevailing style might be called 'complex anachronism'. One reviewer described the finished text as 'Au den and water'. His joke to one side, the influence of works such as Auden's Sea and the Mirror and For the Time Being is strong. But where Auden is invariably apposite in his parallels with modern times, I have often been arbitrary or merely parodic. In all my works for Arthur Boyd I have been guided (I almost wrote "guilty of, the nostrum that styles of all periods collide in the brain, that everything is the same age eternally, once you have considered it. This anachronism doesn't worry me, though I admit that they've overstepped the mark of acceptable anachronism - 'I won't have lame duck empires, Jonah, I won't see people failing to respect death' - yet the more nakedly parodic episodes strike me as lasting better, after fifteen years since their composition, than some of the Biblical echoes and poetic lyrics. Thus, "Jonah's Prayer" keeps some of the wonder of the Christopher Smart litany it was based on, and in "Jonah's Journal" the Robinson Crusoe echoes sometimes flower into real imagination. The Whale half is probably more successful than the Nineveh, though there is more strangeness in the second part, especially in the poems based on The Gourd, The Worm and The East Wind. The sequence ends with two quatrains, the second of which continues to affect me.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 71 For us the Garden is set in its clockwork glory, Nineveh sits by the river forever in the story, No-one is old and God listens on his throne, At the end the bone sings: He hears the singing bone.

The Bible and the Brothers Grimm come together in this ending.

Arthur and I hardly consulted each other; I simply sent him the poems in batches of threes and fours as they were finished. I remember starting the whole sequence in Venice and ending it in a spurt a year later in London. I was not prepared for the scale and opulence of Arthur's response. He poured into our collaboration an extraordinary cornucopia of pictures - charcoal and ink drawings, etchings, drypoints and, for the cover, a beautiful colour painting of Jonah being vomited onto the beach by the whale, which now hangs in Tom Rosenthal's office. In many respects, this our first book together, remains Arthur's most prodigal response to my writing. Here are many images new to the Boyd iconography - the predatory gull, the night-time womb, the foreshortened corpse (shades of Mantegna's Christo Morto), the magic mirror, and assorted flowering gourds, pharoses, palms etc. Also mixed in are such abiding Boyd images as dogs muzzled and unmuzzled, the garlanded penis, featuring as 'La Source', striking comets like Signorelli's, sharp-beaked birds, and all the writing lovers and wrestlers. There were originally over a hundred pieces of art work and Rosenthal and I were determined to get as many into the book as possible, with the result that we overcrowded it and perhaps muffled the effect of Boyd's prodigious imagery. Nor were the production standards all they could have been - nevertheless Jonah stays with me as a rich and unashamed commentary on an attractive story. Both Arthur and I have found the comedy as well as the misanthropy in the original, and Boyd particularly has let his imagination flourish in territory where it is always at home - Biblical monstrosity. Jonah established from the beginning the way the poems and the pictures might live together: neither surrenders suzerainty to the other but each must be read in harness on the page. Boyd does illustrate individual phrases and verbal images, but the effect of his drawings is not to fill out the abstract vision of the words but to create a visible world parallel to the one I had adapted from the Jewish folk tale. Jonah was published in 1973 but before it appeared, Boyd and I had embarked on our second collaboration. This owed its subject to the commissioner, the Melbourne Gallery owner Georges Mora, whose early memories of living in Paris included trips to the Musee de Cluny on the Left Bank, where the most striking images are to be found in the famous sequence of tapestries portraying the legend of The Lady and the Unicorn. Mora set Arthur and me to work on the same subject and again Rosenthal contracted to published the book (Secker & Warburg, London). Our method was the same as with Jonah, except that we had no ready-made source of the story. The highpoint of the legend is familiar enough, that the Unicorn, the fabulous beast representing purity, could be trapped only by a virgin girl. The Cluny tapestries, however, are full of much other matter whose iconography is now obscure. Neither Arthur nor I saw the tapestries until after we had completed our own interpretation. I did look at some reproductions, but, except in the Epilogue, 72 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 with its references to the mille fleurs, the monkey and the slogan Amon seul desir, ignored their imagery. But I needed some events, if I were not to overembroider the one main point of the legend. Accordingly, I searched the London Library for material and came up with very little. Not being a medieval scholar, I could use the confused references by Scaliger and others only if someone had taken them out of Church Latin and put them into English. The most helpful material was in a book of legends of the Middle Ages compiled by the strange Victorian poet, hymn writer and commentator Sabine Baring­ Gould, where I found the Unicorn alongside such fascinating unclassicallegends as "The Story of the True Cross" (which enabled me to make sense of Piero della Francesca's Arezzo frescoes) and "The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus" (mentioned by John Donne in a sexy poem). Much of the story I made up myself. The Lady and the Unicorn is a much more straightforward work than Jonah, and it receives from Arthur a simpler set of pictures, even though the detail in them flowers into the most beautiful arabesques. The story unfolds directly. The Unicorn was left out of the Ark and is therefore a mythical beast. It supplies, however, its neck for Christ as he hung on the Cross. The Emperor, who has every creature, true or fabled, in his menagerie insists, in his jaded collector's decadence, on possessing the unicorn. The hunters set out to trap it, but fail. The Unicorn falls in love with the Lady (a young virginal girl unworthy of it, since she wants to belong to the Ferrari and Jet Set). At first their love is happy but the bored girl (in my most flagrant piece of anachronism), who would rather share a flat with air hostesses, betrays the Unicorn to the Emperor's agents. Th~ Emperor tries to coax the Unicorn into friendship but losing patience imprisons it. There it is visited by the angel of death and dies. There is an epilogue returning the Unicorn to the imagery of the Cluny tapestries. This fits into twenty poems, each faced by a large-scale etching. Thus The Lady and the Unicorn is a more unified work than Jonah. Some of the writing strikes me as possessing the necessary virtuosity, especially "The Hunters Set Out to Trap the Unicorn", a smooth procession of rhyming tetrameters, and "The Unicorn Before the Emperor", where chic irony modulates into:

When she lets you put your horn in her lap, do you see the valleys of Moses' upbringing, the first world of teenage love, all doubts and running eye-shadow, or is it the trumpets of Joshua and the circuits of the sun? Why do you love a commonplace girl I could duplicate by the million?

Again, there is a piece of parody Auden, which I like, "The Lady's Wedding." Perhaps the most imaginative writing, as with both Jonah and the later Narcissus, is in prose, "Death and the Unicorn." Boyd's pictures are striking in every sense, none more so than the jacket illustration which also faces the tenth poem. Here is a Botticellian girl enmeshed with the Unicorn, which has changed into a Breughel-like set of bagpipes, plus

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 73 from "Narcissus': Reproduced by courtesy ofArthur Boyd, Peter Porter & T. G. Rosenthal.

74 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 one entirely Boydian touch, a single cast shoe lying beside them. Each picture is white on intense black and the mastery of sheer line and complexity of drawing is virtuosic, surpassed in Boyd's work only by the similar extravagance of his pictures for Narcissus. The celebration of both the fertile and terrifying aspects of sexuality, which is Boyd's constant preoccupation, makes the book as disturbing as it is beautiful. Nets, mirrors, dogs of various sizes and shapes, helmeted soldiers (looking forward to the Mars to come), spears and humans with aboriginal features are all dominated by the image of the Unicorn itself, which Boyd draws with Protean splendour. Both Jonah and The Lady and the Unicorn have a life beyond the books which embody them. When Boyd creates his pictures, the spin-off in prints and even in large canvases is in his mind. There have been several exhibitions of the original pictures (to size), and sets of prints, chiefly etchings, have sold well. In the case of complete sets the purchaser gets a free copy of the book concerned, but many collectors possess magnificent Boyds in entire ignorance of the poems which they go with. I do not resent this in the least. I believe firmly that our joint action, though granting each man autonomy, is most valuable for the Boyds it produces. I am happy that my poems should be the "onlie begetters" of Arthur's images. Our next collaboration however was not, like its two predecessors, so clear-cut in its chronology. Normally, Arthur will wait, once the subject is agreed, for the poems before he begins drawing. With Narcissus, the concept came from him, though the arrangement was again that Rosenthal would publish the finished book. The story of Boyd's discovery of the country along the valley of the Shoalhaven River, south of Sydney, has been told in Sandra McGrath's The Artist and the River (Bay Books) and Ursula Hoff's The Art of Arthur Boyd (Andre Deutsch): it is an example of an artist's happy stimulus in mid-career leading him to a new level of achievement. Both at Riversdale and Bundanon, he has found an Arcadia which is neither idealised nor compromised by Rousseauian preconceptions. The many paintings which Arthur has made of the river and its environs are, I believe, the most important breakthrough in the painting of the Australian landscape since the days of Streeton and Tom Roberts. Soon after Arthur went to the Shoalhaven he told me of his vision of the river and the rain forest behind it as a sort of paysage for Narcissus. Water is not only the element ofreflection and of self-knowledge, but its laziness is the other side of the coin of its life-giving function. The decade of the Seventies was a troubled time for me. My wife died at the end of 1974, just after my first return to Australia for twenty years. My daughters and I spent five months of 1975 in Sydney and we visited Arthur at Riversdale. While there, we ventured inland, over many ancient fallen cedar trunks, to view a superb orchid growing out of solid rock in the rain forest. Back in London, I wrote a poem entitled "The Orchid on the Rock", which derived from my Riversdale experience. At the same time, I agreed to write a suite of poems to do with Narcissus. Originally, it was called Narcissus at Nowra. Arthur had shown me paintings and other pictures he had already composed on the Narcissus theme, including "Jigger on a Sandbank" and "The Rainbow Maker". This time I had no very clear idea of what I wanted to write about, other than that the poems were to be about the prevailing solipsism of self-awareness, and were to use the Shoalhaven area as their playground. Narcissus is Greek, though

WESTERLY, ]\;0. I, MARCH, 1987 75 he comes to us these days with a Viennese accent. The sense that the self is somehow hateful and lovable at once (a Pascilian notion) is very close to me, and I thought I could bend the old legend of the beautiful youth who died for love of his own reflection into an Australian cautionary tale. To do so I should not abandon its Europeanness. Les Murray warned me that bringing Greek gods and mythological creatures to Australiajust wouldn't do - the hemisphere wouldn't accomodate them. But I had observed that the Shoalhaven at Riversdale looked very like the background to Piero di Cosimo's mythological study in the London National Gallery, usually entitled "Cephalus and Procris". Florentine painters unashamedly yoked together bits of the Arno and the contado of their native city and Greek and Roman moral stories, so why should I not do the same. Arthur had anyway given me licence by locating Narcissus on the Shoalhaven already. I wrote the first poem in Sydney on a visit in 1976, and it remains a favourite. It is a tribute to the art of painting itself, entitled "The Painters' Banquet". The rest of the sequence came in two bursts, though not without difficulty. The first batch was written in London in 1977 and the whole suite not finished until early in 1979. Then, in turn, Arthur did not begin his etchings until late 1983. With his customary celerity he composed twenty­ five of his most complex and baroque images in a few weeks in time for exhibition at Fischer Fine Art in St. James's early in 1984. Narcissus, unlike Jonah and The Lady and the Unicorn has no narrative and is not dramatic. It is a series of deflected portraits of the self, as though one had entered a fun-fair alley of distorting mirrors. Some of the details I took from what I had seen in my, by now, frequent visits to Australia. Much of the rest came from childhood memories, and I was conscious all the time of the surroundings of the Shoalhaven River. In 1978, I published in The Cost of Seriousness, a set of three poems which shared the same preoccupations as Narcissus. This was called "Three Transportations", and the third of the poems was titled "Piero di Cosimo on the Shoalhaven ". Narcissus is about Metamorphosis, the beautiful and the terrible changes. It is again heavily anachronistic, but it is also the most Pantheistic poetry I have written. In "Echo's Moon-Calf", I recall a barbecue I went on with Les Murray along another Australian river, the McDonald, and in "The Narcissus Emblems" I show Narcissus well aware of Murray's warnings to the European gods to keep out of Australia.

The native gods want to send me home. Go back where you come from, half-arse Greek! At their wombat supper and their cassowary tea, will they ask the Women's Circle to embroider them some scenes on a doily; a euchre game, a shower tea?

But I am not unmindful of Murray's doctrine and I hope that Narcissus avoids the fey and elfin classicising which Hugh McCrae used to go in for. "At the Palace" seems to me the best poem after "The Painters' Banquet", but I believe that the book is better read for its whole tone rather than for individual excellences. Again, there is a parody - "From the Autobiography of Narcissus"

76 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 from "Narcissus': Reproduced by courtesy ofArthur Boyd, Peter Porter & T. G. Rosenthal.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 77 - in which it amused me to write in the manner cultivated by Sydney avant­ gardists of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Arthur Boyd's Narcissus engravings are among his most audacious works. The cover and the image facing poem 12 are colophons of the self-loving spirit prostrate before its own existence. Pelicans (also in Piero di Cosimo), ferns, rainbows, crows,lyre-birds, tooth-baring heads strangely like pictures of fibroid growths, fossils and skulls, and Arthur's ever-present flowering penises dominate an iconography which is always self-consuming. Out of this welter ofthreat and vanity, he has made an amazingly beautiful world where all things are contingent on each other. The picture attached to "Echo's Farewell" shows Boyd's art at its most commanding and elegant. A wild Narcissus leans from the river bank to embrace a swan, which is reflected in the water, though he is not. The convention of etching turns the river into stygian blackness and the swan could perhaps be The Swan of Tuonela (another European legend, but not one mentioned by the poetry). Even without having to decipher the significance of the symbolism, the viewer is conscious of the link between self­ love, beauty and death. Eight years passed between The Lady and the Unicorn and Narcissus. Now Boyd and I are working on Mars, again at the suggestion of Tom Rosenthal. The poems (about 40 of them) are finished and the first images of Mars were to be glimpsed earlier this year in several paintings in Arthur's show at Fischer Fine Art. Mars was wearing a golden helmet strangely like a German pickelhaube from World War I, and suggested the soldiers in The Lady and the Unicorn. I took a risk with Mars, since it is easy to drown in good intentions if one sets out to satirise or denounce war and human aggression. Also, I have never been a soldier and have only once fired a rifle on a range, and that in the school cadet corps. Arthur served in the army in the Second World War, so he at least has better credentials than I have. But I believe that imagination and the human retrieval system will do the work of direct experience, and I am hopeful that Mars will turn out to be our most successful collaboration so far. My pride in the work which Boyd and I have done together is based, at least in part, on the notion of service to the Muses. Arthur Boyd is a major painter in world terms, and he is rare in being inspired by words. To be able to take part in the creation of a double universe - the one fantastical yet always real, the other abstract but unable to escape meaning - is a privilege. The poems and pictures continue to live separate lives, but they could never have been born without each other.

78 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 SANDRA MOORE

The Boy From the Dark Street

A woman looked out of her open kitchen window into a green backyard. It was late on a Sunday afternoon in a good suburb. She had been shut away in her room all afternoon, writing letters. 'Want to go for a walkT she called to the man who still sat in his room, reading a textbook with 'Leadership' written in large letters on its cover. 'Ahh ... : he said doubtfully. She did not hear, but went on as if to persuade him, although she would have been quite happy to go alone. 'I've got letters to post. C'mon. Do us good to get some air. Nice drippy autumn day.' Throughout the past week there had been a heatwave, which had broken with storms the night before; the season had turned overnight. Despite the dampness of the outside air all the windows of the house were open. 'Okay: he decided, and went to get a jacket. She was already raincoated and eager to go, moving from room to room, closing all the windows and turning their locks. She passed by him in the kitchen, on her way to lock the back door. 'We won't be gone that long,' he said with an edge of irritation; but he often forgot to close the back door. One day in the last month he had been last out of the house and they had been robbed. She had been robbed: the moneybox by the phone had been taken and it was she who paid the phone bills. Worse, her jewellery had gone - a rolled gold crucifix set with garnets, inscribed "With Love To My Teenager, Dad, 1958"; a friendship ring that was a relic of the sixties and The Boyfriend; Great Auntie's out-of-date rather than antique amethyst drop earrings, a twenty-first birthday present. What had hurt most, more even than the man's carelessness, was the casual opinion of the policeman who came to take details: except for the earrings, the pieces were worthless to a thief, probably thrown away. She locked the front door behind them and hid the key. 'If you're going to be robbed you'll be robbed,' he said. He detested the way she mistrusted people. She pressed her lips shut and looked for something else to talk about. She pointed to a shrub in the next door garden.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 79 'That'd do to screen the back shed.' They had married late, both well into their thirties. They met at evening classes for 'Administrative Management', which he attended because he was ambitious and she because she was sent by the head of the council library, where she worked. They had married because it seemed to each that this might be the last chance. Neither had high hopes of happiness, but after six years it was apparent that that even contentment was not possible. Loneliness pervaded their house like a sour smell. She was aware of it, like mould, or stale human habitation, and aired the house constantly, in all weathers, to no avail. She spent a lot of time in the garden. She liked to walk briskly, taking exercise; he preferred to stroll. She was alert to gardens and houses and the sights offered along the streets. It seemed to him that she noticed every trivial thing and pointed it out to him - the perfumes of plants, combinations of colours that people painted their houses, even files of ants and the split shells of the summer's cicadas that had hidden against the bark of trees or on the silver wood of weathered fences. He liked to talk as he walked, using the time to work out ideas. She interrupted the flow of this thoughts. As they went along, he reviewed the past week at the college where he was a departmental head. He went on, planning the prospect of the week to come. It seemed to her, from the way he always talked about it, that the college was in a permanently pre-revolutionary state; he was forever involved in plots that never climaxed. Their walking had no rhythm. They progressed like rail trucks in a shunting yard, all runs and halts, the conversation moving back and forth on different tracks, never smoothly forward. She had as little interest in his talk as he in hers, but their unspoken pact kept it going. He was two steps behind her, describing a meeting past or to come, when they turned into a sidestreet at the bottom of a hill. The darkness of the dull afternoon had collected there. An oddly familiar smell teased them. 'Is that mould?' she asked. 'Bottom of the hill,' he said, and matched his pace to her quicker stride. 'Funny that we haven't come this way before,' she said. 'We must have. It's so close to home.' The dark street dog-legged into one slightly lighter, and this joined the main road at a T-intersection. The letter-box was up a hill on the corner where this main road crossed another. A boy on a bicycle shot between them out of the dark street. They were into the curve of the dog-leg. They were walking abreast, but not close, and parted like a sudden bow-wave at the instant he was upon them. The uneasy thought occurred to each that the boy had watched their passage through the dark street, but neither spoke of it. They watched him and saw, ahead of his hawk-fast bike, a cat on the road. It was small black cat, not much more than a kitten, sitting primly and prettily a third of the way across the road. For once, he noted, she didn't comment. They saw the boy swoop on the cat with a deft twist of his handlebars. The cat escaped by a whisker and slithered under a parked car. The bike stopped.

80 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 The boy twisted his body, looking over his shoulder at where the cat had hidden. The light was fading fast and his face, dark-skinned, showed smudges where his eyes would have been, and white teeth. Then he turned his back, pedalled strenuously, leaned into the corner at the main road and was gone. 'Did you see that!' she cried. 'He didn't mean to hurt it,' he said, and the edge to his voice echoed his earlier implied complaint, when she had so thoroughly locked up the house. 'He certainly did,' she snapped. She was shocked enough to forget and bend their rules of discourse. 'Kids,' she sighed, conciliatory, calming herself. 'Discipline's a problem. Even at our place,' he said. She knew he meant the college. They disregarded the boy. "Discipline" was an agenda topic for the next monthly heads of departments meeting and he had some ideas. He sketched them for her, although she would have known them by heart, if she ever paid him more attention. 'I wonder if there are possums in that hedge,' she said in a lull. At her Great Auntie's the cypress hedge was alive with possums at dusk. She had lived with her elderly aunt throughout her mother's final illness, just before her marriage. Her father had died years before that, when she was thirteen. She had a vision of the back door standing open, and an empty mirrored jewel box on the dressing-table ... She pulled at a stalk of lavender that pierced a fence. 'Smell,' she demanded, turning to face the man. The boy hissed by on his bike, heading for the parked car where the cat had sheltered. It happened fast. She stood with crushed lavender in her cupped hands. Over the man's shoulder she saw the boy on the bike slow, calculate, speed forward and skillfully flick the cat broadside with his spinning front wheel. She heard the cat - 'Mip' - the boy had turned, and even as the cat scrambled for balance, he ran bump, bump, across its body. It had happened so fast that she closed her eyes too late. The man was still dutifully smelling the proffered lavender. The moment moved on. He assumed that she was in some sudden emotional state connected with the lavender, memories of Auntie What"s-her-name, who probably flavoured her dunny with lavender disinfectant or what-not. She had closed her eyes too late. She opened them. The boy passed them again, bobbing jauntily from side to side on the bike. Passing, he stared into her eyes, laughing silently, delightedly, showing his white teeth in his twilit face. She recognized that he laughed with pleasure at pain, hers and the eat's. She was exposed: it was as if he had found her out. The lavender fell to the path. She caught up with her husband who, suddenly impatient, had walked ahead. The boy was gone. 'Have you seen that kid around before?' she asked. 'What kid?' 'On the bike ... just before.' 'Come to mention it ... 1 think 1 have.' She walked faster and the gap between them opened. 'Now, hang on,' he protested, catching the drift of her thoughts. 'It was obviously professionals; only stuff you could get rid of straight away.'

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 81 'Get rid of ... ' she muttered, remembereing what the policemen had said. A hot wave of hatred swamped her; she could find no satisfactory object for it - the boy, the thief, the man, their life? Everything. If that kid came back to torment her again, she'd kill him, burst his brain with a look, squeeze him into a ruddy mess like the little black cat. Her breath shuddered. click zizz, click zizzo 'S'cuse me,' said the boyan the bike, huskily polite. The man, walking on the traffic side of the path (they were now walking uphill along the main road), stepped across behind the woman to let him pass. The boy flattered him with a smile. She saw the smile too, and it transmuted from servility to insolence. 'See,' he seemed to sneer, and her rage quailed. He cycled up the hill in front of them, balanced, standing steadily in the pedals; the machine rocked from side to side. They saw him reach the crest of the hill where the letter-box stood dully red against the sky. Then he turned sharply, out of sight again. They reached the letter-box in a long silence. She posted her letters. The man walked on, assuming that they would circle back to their house, but she stood still at the crest as if making up her mind about something. She called him back: 'No. Back the same way.' He shrugged. He was beyond irritation with her and was unsure why. It had something to do with her eternal pessimism, her rush to judgement about the kid on the bike, just as she always rushed to judge him. He could tell, that was her attitude to him, quick judgement, contempt. He had provided a good home in a good suburb, studied on and on for years to keep rising at work, for her benefit as much as his. Certainly, he wanted to get ahead for his own sake, but she did take the benefit of his efforts; she only worked part-time, and anyhow, she liked books. She blamed him for the robbery. Hardly a robbery; a few dollars and some trashy bits of trinkets. Sentimental value, of course, but why poison his life with it? If it was his mistake: she might have come home and gone out again that morning. It had been her day off. Resentment carried him past his wife. He reached the corner at the bottom of the hill first, and turning, pulled up short, confronted by the boy on the bike. She was three steps behind. The bike was square in the middle of the foot-path, pointed like a weapon. The boy, shadowy but for grinning teeth, straddled the machine, his feet rooted to the path, his arms folded on the handlebars. His shoulders shook and his eyes moved delightedly from one face to the other. 'Pardon,' said the man, interrupting a pause full of his own unacknowledged shock. The boy nodded as if something suited him very well, as if he was satisfied and ready to begin. He mounted his bike, steadied himself with one hand on a fence and let them scrape past him. Her fear of the boy was modified by her husband's discomposure; now he led the way briskly. They could not hear the bike, they dared not turn to look, but they were sure that he was following. They passed two houses, three, four, and the man slowed his pace. 'I wonder if you could do some typing for me tonight?' he asked. 'Is there much?' she hedged, a familiar move in their customary game. She always had work of her own to do for the library.

82 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 He did not answer, because they had rounded the dog-leg curve and ahead, in the dark street, a bike lamp winked at them. 'Ignore him,' said the man, but it was impossible. The flashes showed the ghost of a parked car and the bike's front wheel nUdging an irregular, small shadow on the road. The man and the woman were dislocated into a qualmy dream. Side by side they faltered on. It was very dark in the dark street. Into the woman's mind slid the idea that this was their street, that their house was nearby, but nevertheless they were lost. The wind of the boy's passing rushed between them, flinging the reek of the street in their faces. 'Hey you! Son! You could hurt someone ... ' The husband cleared his throat. 'Skylarking,' he told his wife, desperate for her to signal agreement. 'You bloody fool.' The words tasted of metal. Their pact shattered. He stood; she ran for where home had been. In the dark, the boy was turning.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 83 LOUISE KATHERINE WAKELING

A l-Qahirah (The Victorious)

shutter windows lunge at a back alley

voices, somewhere, and a mosque cassette gags on Allahu Akbah for a full five minutes till they turn it off

I see the sky's in purdah still, Muqattam Hills hunched behind a leaden veil that never lifts. Up there they're building a new city for the rich - soldier-boys sprawl behind sandbags tumescent rifles poised to keep intruders out

down here we make do with the old city: in the Fatimid quarter crumbling tenements are tombs and by way of compensation the City of the Dead itself is home to a hundred thousand people

84 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 on the heaving Nile the stench of bloated cow rolls on past us over and over under Tahir Bridge but the boatman shinnies up the mast to furl the sail pointing at the empty towers of penthouses along the banks

on the way to the airport the city is decanted for me one last time - 'the Sheraton Hotel Sadat's monument/the place where he was killed' my taxi-driver says

the last fifteen hours I've drunk bottled water and waited for a flight out of Egypt

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 85 LOUISE KATHERINE W AKELING

Occam's Razor

(it's vain to do with more what can be done with less)

l.

three times I saw her, tree strapped to a table, slide into a buzz-saw father flicked the switch on

I was ten. He said "I'll have her put away" (breadknife gnawing at my belly) meaning he and doctor put their heads together and she went

At Tuggerawong she ran out on the road trucks passed sometimes (back-road slung around the lake like a holster) waiting to be levelled like the paspallum she worried over day and night

at the house in Arncliffe she grappled a knife from the kitchen dresser threatening to turn it on herself

86 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 2

she came home wan ventilated all the slats of her mind broken and bleeding light. They'd put her in a bath and burned her and now there were only black holes in her night-sky and the sound of falling bodies. (I saw her, Medicean star, adjust to the slow drift of her moon cut loose from its moorings)

3

She showed me the pink foam looped in flowers she'd made in therapy at Broughton Hall; she doesn't pry in corners, sorting memories mouldering on hooks, but they bang about in her head still, coat-hangers in an old cupboard

Twenty years on, she stands in my kitchen blankly trying to remember or forget calls me liar when I say she beat me sometimes. Her hands grip the stove, retrograde, and in the body's inertia she leaves well enough alone.

WESTERLY. No. I, MARCH, 1987 87 resources to comfort him and give him BOOKS courage. (Another critic might see it as a conservationist poem ... I say, pity 'bout that last stanza that points ;-. that literal! 00000000 explicit direction:

Three hundred yards each side of the track is untouched but you'd swear it had been mined Caroline Caddy, Letters From the North, already Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1985. 87p. The hills are bulldozed ore dumps.) $9.95. Still, it works because it's restrained ... I There is much that Caroline Caddy's call "it" restraint; others call it the laconic, collection of poems, Letters from the North, Australian habit; some, "the spaces". (Peter is not. It is not thematically unified, for Cowan's gait; Patrick White doesn't. But it's example (nor, as I read it, does it aim to be). not simply Australian. Hemingway had it, There are six groupings of poems with the Lawrence lacked it.) ... A little is a lot ... odd recurring ideas: regrowth, learning. It is often the best line is the final line; and, not the voice of one person; rather, it is many mercifully, the writer trusts herself and "the voices. (Her best poems, I feel, are the truth" she freezes in irony. monologues: There's drama and trauma here, an immediacy and urgency of man and It's been raining thirty miles away. The road is closed at Cane River. moment.) It is not the stuff of one place or Nothing is getting through. one time, either. Caroline Caddy is every­ where (does that make her universal?): There is such desperation in isolation, and Australia, Japan, America. She contexts her she doesn't have to say (and she doesn't say) work with references to Puskin and Fumio "there is such desperation in isolation." Yoshimura. Her forms are many. She even dares haiku - so delicate, only a woman There is little time to think understands. (I suspect, though: haiku are Even when we are not working more than seventeen syllables. And can we, All your letters have come at once. here, ever know "the white iris in the still pond" as can those who have a yen for zen Her creation of character through dramatic - inbuilt, culturally?). There is little about irony gives the final poems (" A member of the Letters that's political (although the personal, tribe") special force as well. The voice is as we know, is political). There is no hatred, American, and its rhythms and blues seem arrogance, or pretentiousness here. Instead, right. "Dela" is worth a lot of Browning put it's an honest work, a sincere and authentic together: record of human experience. It is not Howl or Come to Me My Melancholy Baby or His mother went to this tent meeting. Paterson, but, gee, it's got its moments. She said she had to have GOD but that the enemy didn't want that The long piece, which the collection takes to happen. its name from, is the strongest in the book. So she made this personal testimonial ... The subject is Man alone and at odds, up "North", where the threat is the "Yanks" and Caroline Caddy, according to the book's the "Corporation" (U.S.A. and B.H.P. have flyleaf biography, "spent her early childhood attained symbolic stature), and where the in America." The years obviously made their threat is also man himself and his lack of inner mark. It was from those years, perhaps, that

88 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 she learned the language of feelings: The infelicities here, though, are few. Sometimes it's the diction: " ... buoys ... I have strong feelings. shift ... to some more complex schema/ I like to touch Articulating out from imaginations flame." She's more reserved and I respect that but sometimes I feel Jesus honey (The lines seem overwrought.) Sometime the hug me syntax is a trifle tortured: Sit on my lap. briefest cough of a diesel throat "Their" way of talking - and pardon the translates to the lurch of gouged wheels. word, "communicating" - puzzled her, but Flat sunk-land turns morass. pleased her, because the word, in some, is made Flesh. In another poem "Edith", the The clicnes trouble me: "cicadas tick". speaker cites her mother-in-Iaw's words to her (Why must cicadas be such an "all pervading son, her husband: presence" in Australian Literature? Cicadas rival seagulls for OVERUSE/ ABUSE ... I never knew about his mother. Fortunately, Lettersfrom the North spares us I couldn't understand how she talked. You can get another wife she'd say the cockroach in the bathtub.) but you can't get another mother. And the redundancies and the repetitions You can get in the gutter she'd say. are two, too many: "... put his hands A fire on you. A burning on you! together and fell forward classic dive"; "so we go over and she's got to show us her new teeth. It gives off sparks. It rightly draws Her teeth!" But the greatest worry is the but attention to itself and how language shapes rate tendency to relate (and not to recreate) - and disfigures - reality. And its humour, experience. The stricture here is an old saw: however pathetic, cushions the blows. Again, show, don't tell. from "Dela", one more time with feeling: "On the whole", "overall", and "in the final analysis" (if there ever can be one!), the So she made this personal testimonial That was the number one best collection is to be recommended. I am seller in America she said rewarded by each rereading of the title poem 'I buy Tide because ... ' and the monologues. and we all have something to sell ourselves to the GOOD LORD Jim Legasse and He WILL BUY. So she made this personal testimonial. Sold herself to God. And she'd sing all the time ALL THE TIME John Scott, Landscapes of Western Austra­ He set my life to music now I am a Symphony. lia, Aeolian Press, Claremont, 1986, $39.95. The best poems are often the most simple, This handsomely produced book is a the least strained and straining to make a welcome contribution to our appreciation of statement. What we're aware of, as readers, the landscapes of Western Australia and their is not the nature of nature (human or representation in two art forms, painting and otherwise), but words and how they work in photography. making us aware of the nature of nature. The In his introduction, Professor Scott briefly image alone can startle us into new percep­ outlines the history of landscape painting in tion: "Apples ... still hang Exotic bells" (I Europe and raises the question of which hope the Apples are the bells, and the "Exotic aspects of this tradition have been inherited bells" don't simply mean "I've been to Bali by Australian artists. In this regard he sees too "). Australian landscape painting as "an attempt

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 89 to understand and come to terms with a truly light have influenced painters. Arguing that New World." For early painters, of course, "it is light that gives life to landscape," he Australia was not only a new world but also examines how increasing appreciation of the adeeply alien one. Noting that many elements characteristics of the light in Western of traditional European iconography - Australia has become a distinctive feature of motifs such as birth, death, regeneration - the state's art. Thus, to add briefly to were not readly accommodated by the almost Professor Scott's comments on the painting, permanently harsh and desolate Western Elizabeth Durack's "Country Eaten Out" is Australian landscape, Professor Scott sug­ an example of a work in which light fulfils gests that Western Australian landscape both a compositional and a symbolic painting represents an "attempt to control - function. This work captures the strength and and, if possible, dominate the glare of desert light and the confusion this environment. " causes the eye. It also uses this representation This is his structuring thesis, which he of a visual effect to highlight white Australian attempts to illustrate by juxtaposing Richard blindness to the problems of the Aboriginal W oldendorp 's photographs of landscapes population. Professor Scott confines his with paintings of the same or similar comments about the role oflight to discussion landscapes. The art-works selected date from of the paintings. However, as Woldendorp's the first European contact with Western photographs - "Pilbara landscape" (62) is a Australia, such as "Swarrte Swaane drift op good example - demonstrate, photo­ het Eyland Rottenest" (1697) to the work of graphers also have taken advantage of the contemporary artists like William Boissevain artistic possibilities offered by the distinctive and Mac Betts. While the paintings are lights of Western Australia. arranged more or less chronologically, the Professor Scott's commentary raises an book does not purport to offer a survey of the interesting question as to methodology. genre in Western Australia; rather it is an Despite his clear commitment to Western appreciation of selected landscape paintings. Australia and its art, his introductory text is Arguing that the development of photo­ heavily Eurocentric, referring freely to Dante, graphy freed artists from the need merely to Delacroix, Wordsworth, and even Oscar represent their environment, Professor Scott Wild. Professor Scott's discussion of Euro­ seeks to contrast the literal reproduction of pean landscape painting and his attempt to landscape through the "mechanical eye" of thus construct a context within which the camera with the imaginative transforma­ Western Australian painting can be seen is tion of landscape by the painter. This undoubtedly helpful. However, the extent to juxtapositioning of photographs and paint­ which local landscape painting can usefully ings is one of the book's major achievements. be examined in relation to European tradi­ Woldendorp's photographs, quite apart from tions of high art is limited, and more their intrinsic value, also serve as visual discussion of those local economic, social, commentaries on the paintings; these imagin­ and political factors which also shape the atively complement Professor Scott's written artistic consciousness would have been commentaries. welcome. More attention to these factors In his written commentaries, Professor would have enabled a fuller understanding of Scott discusses how artists have interpreted the relationship which exists between the the environment and, to a lesser extent, how artist and his or her total environment. the environment has affected the artist. He A more contentious assumption underly­ makes a number of interesting points in this ing Professor Scott's discussion concerns the regard. In particular, he looks at the way in relationship between photography and which the different qualities of Australian painting. In his "Foreword" Professor Scott

90 WESTERL Y, No. I, MARCH, 1987 describes photography as an "art." However, drawing with lithographic crayon on transfer his comments elsewhere suggest that he is less paper of the path and rocks. I was intrigued than convinced about this and that his true with the apparent simplicity of the process for position is better expressed when he writes Rees as he drew freely, interpreting the that "the artist has little to fear from his subject rather than describing it; shortening modern rival, the camera." Or, as he writes the shadow across the path, even changing the elsewhere, "only the painter can truly dare so shape of the rocks, but retaining in the much." Professor Scott applies Zola's view of drawing the immediacy and vitality of this art as "a corner of nature seen through a direct confrontation with nature. The temperament" as a means of distinguishing resulting lithograph was The Gorge, painting from photography. Surely, however, Launceston. Zola's comment is equally applicable to Despite early experiments, Rees did not painting and photography. Photography, as begin printmaking until 1976 when he was Woldendorp's work admirably demonstrates, already a mature artist, celebrated both for amounts to far more than observations his painting and his draughtsmanship. recorded "through the lens of a machine." Somewhat reluctant at first to become Painters as well as photographers are involved in a new medium, he quickly dependent on and circumscribed by their adapted the soft-ground etching process and respective technologies and - as Landscapes then lithography to the expression of his own of Western Australia reveals so effectively - view of the world. As for the painter-etchers both technologies are finally at the service of of old (Rembrandt, Goya, Millet, Whistler "a temperament." etc.) printmaking became an extension of his These reservations aside, however, the drawing rather than an exploration of the book clearly succeeds in fulfilling its stated technicalities of the printing process, as it is purpose, which is "to show the way in which for so many contemporary printmakers. the landscapes of Western Australia have However his understanding of the possibili­ inspired artists and an artist-photographer." ties of the medium enabled him to use it to The illustrations are beautifully reproduced. advantage. The actual printing has been Moreover, their physical details are placed at carried out by professional printers, Max the end of the book in such a way as to enable Miller (soft-ground etchings) and later Fred an unimpeded appreciation of the works. Genis (lithographs), working in close consul­ Landscapes of Western Australia is a tation with the artist. worthwhile contribution to our understand­ A catalogue raisonne of Lloyd Rees prints ing of Western Australian culture. has recently been written by Hendrik Kolenberg and published by The Beagle Colette Warbrick Press, from whom we have come to expect high quality publications. This book is no exception. It is designed by Perth designer Lloyd Rees Etchings and Lithographs. A Neil Sellick with an elegance, simplicity and Catalogue Raisonne. by Hendrik Kolenberg. logicality which makes it ajoy to look at and $39.95. practical to use. Although several books have been published on Lloyd Rees, this is the first In 1982 when I was living in Launceston, comprehensive survey of his prints. There are Tasmania, I went with Lloyd Rees, his son a total of 95 prints listed, from two early and daughter-in-law and two friends to the experimental etchings dated 1922 to his most scenic and spectacular Gorge just near the recent lithograph, Sunrise at Sandy Bay of city, where we had the pleasure and privilege 1984-85 which is also reproduced in colour on of seeing Rees set up his easel and make a the dust jacket. About half of the prints are

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 91 in sets. Before each set or group of soft­ the sun now represents the totality of ground etchings and lithographs is an existence, and for the agnostic artist, it introduction by the author listing the works signifies the Source, providing a sense of to follow, and giving background informa­ endless peace and calm. Rather than being tion on their conception and production. physical, light is now a spiritual entity, A reproduction and a wealth of scholarly creating and uniting the world, and represents information is provided by each print. The Rees' identification with the universe." soft-ground etchings have been carefully The catalogue raisonne is a ,rather rare reproduced to show the plate marks. Some of form of serious documentation in Australia. the smaller etchings appear to be facsimile Of previous publications of the kind only size. Each entry gives information concerning James Mollison's Fred Williams Etchings the image and the plate and details of (Sydney 1968) and Helen Topliss' Tom different states, editions, ink, paper, printer Roberts 1856-1931 (Melbourne 1985) come and publisher, signature and inscriptions. to mind. And yet such an exhaustive study is The plates are mostly full-page size and all indispensable to the serious student or colour etchings and colour lithographs are collector of an artist's work. The best known reproduced very faithfully in colour. of all catalogues raisonnes, Adam Bartsch's The author has collaborated with the I.e Peintre Graveur, which catalogues old publisher, Lou Klepac of The Beagle Press, master prints, was published in Vienna in 21 who has also published the most recent volumes between 1803 and 1821 and is still editions of Lloyd Rees lithographs, and who widely used today. proposed to Hendrik Kolenberg that he There are many pitfalls of which the undertake the compilation of the catalogue collector of prints should be wary. Lloyd Rees raisonne. This, Kolenberg was well qualified is now so renowned that his works bring high to do. He is presently Curator of Art at the prices, with the consequent temptation for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart unscrupulous to forge signatures and to and was previously Curator of Prints and misrepresent the artist's work. Only knowl­ Drawings at The Art Gallery of Western edge and experience will offer protection. The Australia. He has organized an exhibition of book establishes a clear distinction between the complete prints of Lloyd Rees to coincide the original etchings and lithographs and the with the publication of the book. The photomechanically made reproductions exhibition will be shown in many centres commercially produced in contrived limited throughout Australlia, including The Art editions. Collectors will also learn that not all Gallery of Western Australia. hand-coloured prints have been coloured by Lou Klepac, who edited and wrote the the artist. With the collaboration and introduction for the book Lloyd Rees example of Lloyd Rees, David Rankin of the Drawings (Sydney 1978) has written the Port Jackson Press coloured by hand several introduction to the catalogue raisonne. A editions of prints. stern critic whose adulation is usually Works which have been hand-coloured by reserved for such giants of the art world as 'Lloyd Rees are often sold commercially as if Rembrandt, Cezanne or Degas, he has seen they were unique works (which they are to a in the late work of Lloyd Rees "a crystalli­ certain extent as the paint often obliterates sation of metaphor into spiritual blossom: the the line of the underlying print). There are flowers of vision." This has much to do with false signatures on some authentic soft­ the symbolic presence of light in Rees work. ground etchings of 1977 and 1978. Examples " ... light is no longer a physical phenomenon of these are reproduced so they may be providing atmosphere and effects as one sees compared with the genuine signatures. in the work of the Impressionists. To Rees,

92 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 It is not clear why the last ten lithographs, leather volume contammg an original most of which were not editioned, are not in lithograph (81. The Distant Derwent 11 1983) chronological order as with the rest of the selling for $500. This is a well researched book catalogue. However this is a minor quibble. which should be essential reading for every The book is reasonably priced at $39.95, admirer and collector of the work of Lloyd paperback $29.95. There is also a limited Rees. edition of 100 copies of a case-bound black Barbara Chapman.

WAR AS SEEN ON CELLULOID

is a major theme of Overland No.1 05 - important articles by Jack Clancy and James Wieland on the way Australian film and television producers have handled the theme of armed conflict, largely in the direction of romantic national self-congratulation.

Harry Heseltine publishes a major statement on the poetry of John Bray, R.A. Simpson, Robert Clark and Judith Wright. Paul Carter's remarkable prose poem on the Aboriginal and the intruder, "What is You Name" - broadcast on Radio National- is printed here for the first time. John Tittensor writes with wit and insight on his first experience of "Writing Australia" in primary school.

Stories by Tim Winton, Ruth Barnes and Lauris Edmond ("Sadie is a shit hot lady. Even if she is my sister. ") Ray Ericksen and the loss of his humanist faith. Len Fox has new material on the history of the Eureka Flag. Ray Whitrod discusses Crime and Community, and our poets include Gwen Harwood, Bruce Dawe, Rosemary Dobson and John Blight.

$5 a copy, $20 a year from PO BOX 249, MT ELIZA, VICTORIA 3930

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 93 Fremantle Arts Centre Press in association with The Centre for Studies in Australian Literature University of Western Australia

An invitation is extended to all Western Australian poets to submit work for a new anthology of contemporary Western Australian poetry. The anthology, to be edited by Hilary Fraser and Dennis Haskell, will be in two sections, one giving a substantial amount of space to a small number of poets, and one offering a broader sampling of Western Australian poetry. An Introduction and Critical Commentaries will be included. Poems may be of any length, and there is no prescribed poetic style. The poems should have been written since 1980 and may have been previously published, including in anthologies. There is no llmit to the quantity of work which may be submitted (but poets are asked to select what they consider to be the best work for the period addressed by the anthology, rather than a sample of their most recent work). Closing date for submissions is Monday August 31, 1987. (Early submissions will be appreciated.) Submissions and enquiries are to be addressed to the editors, Cj- Fremantle Arts Centre Press, PO Box 891, Fremantle 6160.

94 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS DIANE BECKINGHAM - born in Western Australia, has published two volumes of poetry, Melting Point and Small World, and edited Red Acres, her father's reminiscences. BARBARA CHAPMAN - is a freelance curator of art. She was formerly Curator of Fine Art at Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, Tasmania, where she organized a touring exhibition of The Late Drawings and Lithographs of Lloyd Rees. LAURIS EDMOND - from Wellington, New Zealand, was Writer in Residence at Deakin University during 1986 and has won the British Airways Commonwealth Poetry Prize. ADRIANA ELLIS - lives in Perth. She has had short stories published in Australian Literary magazines and in 1987 received a Creative Development Grant towards a collection of short stories. PHILIP HODGINS' first collection of poetry, Blood and Bone, published last September by Angus & Robertson, has been awarded the 1986 Wesley Michel Wright prize for poetry. GRAEME KINROSS-SMITH - author of the best-selling Australia's Writers, Nelson, 1980, has recently been writing prose fiction. He is Senior Lecturer in Australian Studies and Creative Writing at Deakin University. His Johnston piece in this issue is part of a planned sequel to Australia's Writers. ANTHONY LAWRENCE - is a teacher and writer living at Wagga Wagga (place of many crows), where he is organising poetry workshops and readings. PENNY LEE - was born in Western Australia and currently lives in Perth. She has had poems published. This is her first published story. JAMES LEGASSE was a critic, poet and short story writer who contributed many pieces to Westerly and other Australian and American journals. JULIE LEWIS lives in Perth. She has written for radio and her short stories have appeared in Australian magazines. She has had a biography On Air, and a collection of short stories Double Exposure published. PETER LOFTUS -lives in Launceston, Tasmania. He is a regular contributor to Westerly. His main interest is the transformation of language through depth of feeling. ROSALEEN LOVE - teaches history of science at Swinbourne Institute of Technology. She is interested in varieties of ways of writing about science. DA VID METZENTHEN - has had stories published in The Age, The Australian, Quadrant and Simply Living. He is at present finishing a novel for teenagers. SHANE McCAULEY's first book of poetry, The Chinese Feast, was published in 1984. A second, Deep-Sea Diver, has just been published by Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 95 SANDRA MOORE - currently lives and writes at Anglesea on Victoria's central coast. She has had a number of stories published in literary magazines and journals, and some have been broadcast. M.E. PATTI WALKER lives in Sydney and is a member of the Youngstreet Poets. FIONA PLACE - has a B.A. from Sydney University, and recently wrote a script and narrated a community education video for the NSW Department of Health. PETER PORTER is currently writer in residence at The University of Western Australia. His Collected Poems was published by O.U.P. in 1983 and was followed by Fast Forward in 1984. ANDREW SANT'S most recent collection of poetry is The Flower Industry (Angus & Robertson). DOREEN SULLIVAN - is an English graduate from WAIT. She has had fiction published in Skirt and Naked Eye, and has had plays read at WAIT, Corrugated Iron Theatre, SWY, and Interplay. LOUISE WAKELING - co-edited Edge City on Two Different Plans (1983) and co-authored a poetry collection, Small Rebellions (1984). She is currently completing a first novel. COLETTE WARBRICK - is a graduate of the Court auld Institute of Art. She worked in the history department at the Western Australian Museum and is currently engaged on a study of maritime painting in Australia.

In Bruce Molloy's article, Images of Australia: Feature Films of the 1930s (Westerly No.4, 1986), several corrections were not incorporated. Titles of films should read Sons of Matthew (pl0), The Flying Doctor (pI9) and Rangle River (not Range River, p20). Westerly thanks the National Film and Sound Archive for the photographs.

96 WESTERLY, No. I, MARCH, 1987 Autumn Boo~s

THE LYRE IN THE PAWNSHOP Essays on Literature and Survival 1974-1984 FAY ZWICKY $15.00 (hb), ISBN 085564235 I A selection of the author's most incisive articles on many of the best-known contemporary Australian writers and critics, reappraising the parochial values of their writings and their readers in the light of international intellectual concerns.

THE AUSTRALIAN SCAPEGOAT Towards an Antipodean Aesthetic PETER FULLER $9.95 (pb), ISBN 085564 245 9 An art critic with an established international reputation, Fuller sees in the best Australian landscape painting-of Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams-the origins of a new and genuinely Post-Modern aesthetic.

SPINIFEX AND HESSIAN Women in North-West Australia 1860-1900 SUSAN HUNT $19.95 (pb), ISBN 0 85564 242 4 Set against a back-drop of European pastoral, pearling and mining development, this book explores the experiences of women who lived on the north-west frontier: servants, teachers, prostitutes and hotel-keepers; and the Aboriginal women whose country was over-run.

UPSURGE A Novel J. M. HARCOURT $9.95 (pb), ISBN 0855642440 Banned in 1934 for obscenity, this book was sensational too for its questioning of Australia's social and political attitudes through Harcourt's belief in worker-based revolution, his exposure of injustices in the law and business, harassment of female workers and the unemployed. Facsimile edition with modern introduction by Richard A. Nile.

UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA PRESS Nedlands, WA 6009

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